  We discuss the role of repulsive baryon-baryon interactions in a hadron gas
using relativistic virial expansion and repulsive mean field approaches. The
fluctuations of the baryon number as well as strangeness-baryon correlations
are calculated in the hadron resonance gas with repulsive interactions and
compared with the recent lattice QCD results. In particular, we calculate the
difference between the second and fourth order fluctuations and correlations of
baryon number and strangeness, that have been proposed as probes of
deconfinement. We show that for not too high temperatures these differences
could be understood in terms of repulsive interactions.
