News : Meningitis can cause cerebral palsy or epilepsy

Excerpt from STAR ONLINE

A shot for protection

DON’T say children don’t know how to share. Why, they share all sorts of things! Sometimes it’s their toys, their food, but most often, they share the microscopic organisms that live on and inside them.

Lice, for instance. You know how it is – one child has kutu and all the other kids in the class go home scratching.

Or the common cold virus, which is why your child sometimes develops a sniffle after coming home from kindergarten.

Daycare centres, kindergartens and schools are hotbeds for infectious diseases like cold, sore throat, chickenpox and hand-foot-and-mouth (HFM) disease because children are in such close contact all day long.

There is now a conjugate vaccine that can prevent pneumococcal bacterial infection in infants and children up to nine years old.And unlike adults, a child’s immune system is more vulnerable to being invaded by disease-causing bacteria and viruses.

Most of the time, the illnesses that spread are harmless. Plus, you can rest assured that if your child has been vaccinated following the National Immunisation Schedule, he is already protected against many common infectious childhood diseases like rubella, mumps, measles and whooping cough.

Unfortunately, emergencies can happen when you least expect it, as in the case of seven-year-old Thomas Lee. What started out as a normal fever one day turned into a full-blown emergency case of pneumococcal pneumonia.

It was two weeks of agony for little Thomas and his parents who had to watch helplessly as their son succumbed to a frightening disease that did not respond to antibiotics.
Seen under a microscope, the pneumococcus or Streptococcus pneumoniae bacterium looks deceptively pretty, like a strand of pearls, or a string of beads. But don’t be fooled, it’s nastier than it looks.

Pneumococcus causes a group of illnesses called pneumococcal disease, with the scariest ones being the invasive infections. These include bacteremia (infection of the blood), meningitis (infection of the membranes covering the brain or spinal cord), sepsis (an infection in the blood associated with shock and organ failure) and pneumonia (infection of the lungs).
Pneumococcus is the most common cause of meningitis in Malaysia, replacing Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib), for which children are now vaccinated against.

Meningitis is dangerous because the lining of the brain becomes inflamed, and this can cause death or, for those who survive, multiple neurological problems like mental retardation, cerebral palsy, blindness, deafness or epilepsy.

Pneumonia can be near fatal as well. In our country, it is one of the common illnesses that causes childhood hospitalisation and death.

Pneumococcus also causes non-invasive diseases, including otitis media (middle-ear infection) and sinusitis.

These diseases are dangerous, too; a child with middle-ear infection may develop complications like hearing loss, learning disabilities and delays in speech development.
The impact of the pneumococcus bacterium is devastating: each year, more than one million children throughout the world die as a result of pneumococcal disease.
If antibiotics are the marvel that scientific discovery produced to fight bacteria, why didn’t it cure Thomas’ pneumonia?

Many years ago, it might have. But Thomas was probably infected by a strain of pneumococcus that has recently become resistant to penicillin and other antibiotics. This is happening in many countries around the world, including Malaysia, due to the overuse and misuse of antibiotics
Children infected with antibiotic-resistant strains of the bacteria may have prolonged illness because they do not respond to formerly effective drugs. Their disease may spread more rapidly, unless treated with expensive alternative antibiotics.
Clearly, antibiotics are not the answer.

So how do you protect your child from something that spreads through a simple cough, a sneeze, or by the touch of a hand?

Through vaccination, that’s how. And fortunately for parents in Malaysia, there is now a conjugate vaccine that can prevent pneumococcal bacterial infection in infants and children up to nine years old.

The vaccine provides protection against 60%-80% of pneumococcal infections. It is safe, but may sometimes cause some mild reactions like local irritation and fever. Some children may experience other temporary side effects like irritability, drowsiness, restless sleep, decreased appetite, vomiting and diarrhoea.

Although Thomas did not receive the vaccination, he recovered from the infection with no ill effects.

His mother, having gone through the trying ordeal, now advises parents to have their children, especially the very young ones, vaccinated against pneumococcal infection.

“A child cannot live in isolation, and you never know when the infection will strike, and whether you will be as lucky as Thomas to survive unscathed,” she says.

– Article courtesy of the Malaysian Paediatric Association

[tags : seic epilepsy seizures children pediatric neurology]