NSW experiencing epidemic of mycoplasma strain in kids
It causes a slightly more mild pneumonia than the other bacterial causes that we normally get. But at the moment there’s a lot of children presenting to GPS, There’s a lot of children presenting to emergency departments with pneumonia. And what it looks like in most of those kids is a typical respiratory infection, maybe with some fever and muscle aches and then a cough, sometimes a wheeze. And the cough and wheeze can last for a number of weeks in those children. So what we really want to emphasize at the moment is that now’s the time for everybody to get back into those good behaviours around preventing transmission of respiratory infections, things like cough etiquette. Washing your hands, Good hygiene, maybe in crowded circumstances to think about. Mask wearing and just to be aware that we’re coming into winter, this is around, but we’re also going to see viral causes of respiratory tract infections coming on board in the coming weeks as well, one of the things that’s. Common with this bacteria is it tends to affect school age children rather than preschool children. So that is maybe not what many community people would expect and we are seeing four or five times the levels of. This type of pneumonia presenting than we would otherwise see at this time of year. But we have had epidemics in the past. We had one in 2015, we had one in 2019 and in a sense we were due one. And we’ve known that this has caused epidemic pneumonia in East Asia and in Europe in the last six months. So we knew it was coming. We just really want the community to be aware that it’s around. It’s a possible cause of a chest infection in school aged children and let’s all be aware and do what we can to prevent transmission. There’s also a lot of patients presenting to GPS with this, but we were expecting a winter surge of respiratory infection. So you know the the the hospitals are coping well, but it is busy.