Child pneumonia outbreak in US states amid similar illness in China | US News

At least two US states have reported outbreaks of child pneumonia cases while fears abound on a similar illness spreading in China and Europe.

The Warren County Health District in Ohio recorded an ‘extremely high number of pediatric pneumonia cases’ since August. The number, 142, is above the county average and meets the department’s definition of an outbreak.

‘We do not think this is a novel/new respiratory disease but rather a large uptick in the number of pneumonia cases normally seen at one time,’ stated the health district on Wednesday.

The average age of the children affected was around 8 years old and cases were found in several school districts. Symptoms included cough, fatigue and fever.

‘There have been no conclusive patterns among the children diagnosed,’ stated the health district, which notified Warren County last week ‘in an effort to further clarify the nature of the outbreak’.

Some of the cases in Ohio were of mycoplasma pneumonia, which is the same illness that has been causing a spike in sickness among children in northern China and Denmark. The illness has jammed hospitals and resulted in long wait times for patients to be seen.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has requested from China ‘additional  epidemiologic and clinical information, as well as laboratory results’ around the cases, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been communicating with its counterpart in China ‘to make sure that we’re understanding the situation there’, said CDC director Dr Mandy Cohen.

‘We do not believe this is a new or novel pathogen,’ she said on Thursday.

Eastern Massachusetts has also seen many cases of walking pneumonia, which is a mild lung condition that can develop from a respiratory virus called RSV.

‘This is the season for RSV and we’re seeing a whole lot of it… a lot of kids with upper viral respiratory infections, cough, runny nose, some fevers and the thinking with RSV is that it can cause lower viral respiratory infections, so they get spread to your lungs,’ Dr John Kelley of Redwood Pediatrics in East Longmeadow told Western Mass News on Wednesday.

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