As Katrina Bellavance’s seven-week-old daughter kept coughing non-stop, the Calgary mother unzipped her newborn’s pajamas and saw the skin around her tiny ribs tugging inward with each laboured breath.

“In that moment, we knew we had to get her to the hospital as soon as possible,” Bellavance recalled of that frightening night back in 2023.

Her daughter was diagnosed with respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, and spent several days in hospital on oxygen before she recovered. The common but dangerous infection ravages infants’ fragile respiratory systems, leading to difficulty breathing, wheezing, lung inflammation, pneumonia and, in rare cases, death.

RSV might not be a household term for many families, yet it’s “the No. 1 cause of hospitalization, year in, year out, in children during t

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