Search for tag: "common cold"

Interviewer: What is pertussis, what can you do about and can adults get it? That's next on The Scope.

Announcer: Access to our experts with in-depth information about the biggest health issues facing you today. The Specialists with Dr. Tom Miller is on The Scope.

Interviewer: If you get a nasty cough that will not just go away it might be pertussis. The odds are slim but it could be. To find out more about pertussis in adults we're with Doctor Tom Miller here at University of Utah Health Care.

Pertussis; tell me a little bit about it and then tell me how an adult can get it.

Dr. Miller: Pertussis was commonly known as whooping cough and occurred most commonly in children prior to the development of an effective vaccine, and it was deadly. A lot of kids died of whooping cough in the old days.

Interviewer: Another one of these things that the vaccines have made a huge difference, and we forget about it, right?

Dr. Miller: We forget about it and actually what's happened is that kids all in the United States generally get this vaccination for pertussis and it effectively prevents it, but as we get older our immune system forgets about exposure to the vaccine and immunity wanes. And you know what? People coming into the country who are not vaccinated can bring pertussis in.

It's a very highly infective bacteria so you don't need much in the way of bacteria to become infected. And when you are infected, if you are older you could end up with not whooping cough but something called the 100 Day Cough.

For a few days you just feel real crappy. You feel very poorly, you have a sore throat and you develop a cough. It's awful. It's what we call paroxysmal cough. It's deep, it's rapid, it's unending and it's so bad sometimes that it will make you vomit, throw up. It's terrible.

So that's why the recommendation now is that as an adult you should receive a pertussis vaccine with your tetanus and diphtheria vaccine. You only need that once in adulthood but if you don't have that you then are at risk to pick up pertussis should you run into a child or even an adult who might be carrying pertussis. And again, it doesn't take much in the way of contact to develop pertussis.

Interviewer: So how is it transmitted?

Dr. Miller: It's transmitted through vapor droplets. Somebody coughing, they can pick up the bacteria in that way. And again, it's highly infective. Many times patients don't know they have pertussis when they are adults because they don't have this barking whooping cough that the kids used to get. They just start with a cold, but the severity of the cough is the thing that makes physicians think about it.

Now, you can treat the patient once they develop the cough and it can get rid of the pertussis bacteria but it doesn't get rid of the cough, and that cough goes on and on and on, and it's a devil to treat if you can even treat it.

Interviewer: So I guess the message here is if you haven't had that pertussis booster, you should get that.

Dr. Miller: Get the booster. Absolutely.

Interviewer: It is something you see on occasion.

Dr. Miller: I do see it on occasion. In Utah, we have an increase in the rate of pertussis in adults because of our immigrant population. They're not always vaccinated when they come into the country.

Interviewer: International Airport.

Dr. Miller: The simple way to protect yourself is to make sure you get that booster.

Announcer: Have a question about a medical procedure? Want to learn more about a health condition? With over 2,000 interviews with our physicians and specialists, there's a pretty good chance you'll find what you want to know. Check it out at the scoperadio.com.

updated: January 2, 2019
originally published: June 28, 2016

Dr. Gellner: With all the illnesses going around, how do you know when to keep your child home from school? I'm Dr. Cindy Gellner and I'll give you the guidelines on today's Scope.

Announcer: Keep your kids healthy and happy. You are now entering The Healthy Kids Zone with Dr. Cindy Gellner on The Scope.

Dr. Gellner: The truth is children don't learn very well or get much out of school when they're not feeling well. Although it can be difficult to arrange emergency childcare, it truly is in the child's, and their classmates', best interest to keep them home from school when they're sick. The challenge for parents is to decide when it's a simple case of the sniffles or if it's something more serious. Children get frequent fevers. Fever for a child is a temperature over 100.4. A temperature of 101 or greater in a child older than three months is considered a fever. Even if there are no other symptoms, a fever is a sign of an infection. It means your child's body is trying to fight off some sort of illness.

Your child needs to rest in order to heal and if your child has a fever, it's likely they have something contagious. Children should not return to school until they have been fever-free without medication for 24 hours. Most fevers are caused by viruses and the child should get better on their own within a few days. But if your child has a high fever for more than four to five days, they should see their doctor. If a baby under the age of three months old has a temperature of 100.4 or higher, this is something they need to be seen by a doctor for immediately. Fevers can indicate a serious infection in newborns. To help your child with their fever at home, encourage them to drink plenty of liquids. This will help their body fight off the fever and infection.

What about mild coughs, runny noses and sore throats? Well, ideally, no child would ever go to school sick. However, children get colds so frequently, especially when they're young, that they would miss a significant amount of school if they stayed home for every runny nose and scratchy throat. If there is no fever and the child feels fairly well, school is fine. If your child has a severe sore throat, it could be strep and your child should need to see a doctor. Kids with Strep may return to school 12 to 24 hours after they start antibiotics. After that, their risk of spreading strep is less.

What if your child has a bad cough or bad cold symptoms? They need to stay home and maybe they need to see the doctor even, especially if they're having trouble breathing. It could be a severe cold or bronchitis, the flu or pneumonia. Coughs can last up to 18 days so when the cough improves and the child is feeling better, then it's back to school. You don't need to wait the full 18 days or longer for the coughs to disappear entirely.

What about vomiting? A single episode of vomiting can happen if your child is just nervous, maybe there's a test at school or something else going on, but if your child vomits more than once, it's likely to be the stomach bug. That's pretty contagious. If your child has bloody vomit or the vomit is a dark green color, they should be seen immediately by a doctor.

For diarrhea, which often goes along with the vomiting but can be by itself, unless your child has recently finished a course of antibiotics or is on antibiotics, diarrhea is the stomach bug. These viruses are easily passed from one child to the next and there's a good chance your child picked it up at school. If your child has diarrhea, they need to stay home, rest and drink plenty of fluids. If there is blood in the diarrhea, your doctor needs to know about it.

Kids seem to get all sorts of rashes as well around this time of year. If your child has eczema, this will get worse over winter and talk to your doctor about the treatments that your child needs to have to make sure their eczema is controlled over the winter. But what if your child doesn't normally have rashes and they show up with one, one day? Quite often, doctors need to see the rash in order to tell you what it is. It could be one of several viral illnesses or it could be something that's contagious like impetigo, which is a bacterial skin infection that is very contagious and requires antibiotics.

What if your child just isn't feeling up to going to school? Then you need to figure out is it something going on at school, is there a bullying situation, or is your child really sick? If your child is more than just acting tired, if you're having a hard time waking them up, or if you child's behavior is significantly different than usual, please make sure they see their doctor to figure out what is going on. If you have any questions about whether or not your child should stay home school, please call your pediatrician. They can help you figure that out.

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What is RSV and how can I protect my baby? That's today's topic. I'm Dr. Cindy Gellner for The Scope.

So RSV is a common virus that usually affects the nose, throat, and lungs. RSV stands for respiratory syncytial virus. And, normally, for kids over the age of two and adults, it's just like a bad cold. But for those under two years old, and especially preemie babies, this can be very severe.

Symptoms of RSV are usually common cold symptoms: cough, runny nose. The difference is the runny nose is going to be significantly mucusy, copious amounts of mucus. You can get some redness of the eyes, coughing, sore, scratchy throat. In kids under the age of two, especially premature babies, we worry about something called bronchiolitis.

So in bronchiolitis, the virus attacks the small airways of the lungs, and it can cause cough, wheezing, fast breathing, and trouble breathing where they are doing what's called retractions. They're breathing so hard that you can actually see them sucking in air, and you can see indentations underneath their rib cage and in between their ribs, where they're really just trying to suck in as much air as possible.

When your pediatrician listens to your baby's lungs, if they have RSV and bronchiolitis, it actually sounds like Rice Krispies in the lungs; it's just all crackly. Quite often, pediatricians are able to get a good idea if your child has RSV or not just based on the symptoms. Days three through five of an RSV illness are the worst; that's when they're the most symptomatic and again we can usually hear the crackles in the lungs. We can often take samples of mucus from the nose and test it for the virus to see if it is RSV and then we know how to be a little bit more aggressive with treating the viral illness your baby has, if it is positive.

Because RSV is a virus, and not a bacteria, antibiotics, unfortunately, will not help treat RSV. Babies under the age of one quite often will need some extra oxygen and even may be treated in the hospital if their bronchiolitis is so bad that their oxygen level is under 90 percent, and your doctor will be checking your baby's oxygen if you bring them in for these symptoms. And oftentimes if they are hospitalized, they are sent home with oxygen, and then in the office we can help you wean your baby off of the oxygen. RSV illnesses are usually lasting seven to 21 days, but again, it's worst in the first 3 to five days.

So if there's no real good medicine to treat RSV, how do I help my child? Well, there are some cases when we do need to give some medicine. If you have a family history of asthma or your child has had a history of wheezing in the past, before getting RSV, and we hear wheezes going along with those crackles, we might them a treatment of a breathing treatment called albuterol. Albuterol is also the medication that's in the fast-acting inhalers for asthma patients. If your child does well with them, with the albuterol, then we can sometimes get a breathing treatment machine sent home with you and the medication for you.

The most important thing that's going to help your child is sucking out their nose, and we all know how much they love that. Unfortunately sucking out the nose is going to be the best thing for them. You're going to need to use nasal saline before you suction out the mucus. Nasal saline will actually help loosen up thick mucus so you can get it out easier, and then your child will be able to breathe more easily. Sometimes, your physician will be able to give you a prescription to the respiratory outpatient clinic here in Salt Lake City. You can take your baby to the clinics and they are run by respiratory therapists and they are able to do deep suctioning. So they will stick a tube way down in your baby's nose and really suction everything out. It's kind of like Roto Rooter for your baby's nose. But it really helps get the mucus out.

And those prescriptions are usually good for seven days, and the clinics are open 24 hours a day. They're really good about sending your physician a note through the fax or through the computer to let them know you took your child there and what happened. Did the suctioning help? Did they need a breathing treatment? Did they need oxygen? Did they need to get admitted?

So how can you help prevent your child from getting RSV? One thing you can do is make sure that people wash their hands and sanitize before holding your child and try to keep your baby away from people who have cold symptoms.

Unlike certain other viruses that we have vaccines for, there is no vaccine that can prevent RSV. However, babies who are born very prematurely--usually before 30 weeks of the pregnancy--or babies who have certain types of heart disease or chronic lung disease, may be able to be treated with a drug called Synagis. Now Synagis is a kind of antibody which can help prevent severe RSV infections. We used to think that it would actually prevent your child from getting it, period.

Now we now that it will help your baby's immune system to fight off RSV if the baby gets it and prevent hospitalization and shorten the length of illness. Your doctor will let you know if your baby qualifies for Synagis. It's a very expensive medication and only certain babies qualify through their insurance, but those babies who do qualify, we make sure that they get the medicine that they need.

And you're going to need to keep saline and the bulb sucker and a cool mist humidifier handy to help get the mucus out of your baby's nose if they get RSV. And if you think your baby has RSV, please have them seen by your pediatrician within the first few days that they are ill so we can help you take care of them.

updated: October 25, 2022
originally published: December 1, 2014