Vietnam - More kids hospitalised due to viral disease

Cold winds and fears of hand-foot-mouth disease spread have caused an increasing number of children to be hospitalised at the Ha Noi National Hospital of Paediatrics for respiratory diseases.

Head of the hospital's Consultation Department Can Phu Nhuan said that the department received around 3,000 children last Monday, 1.5 times higher than the normal figure.

Almost all patients showed symptoms including coughing, fevers, sneezing and even pneumonia, he said, adding that children aged between 1 and 3 were usually more vulnerable to respiratory diseases.

Nguyen Thi Lien, from northern Thai Binh Province, had to take her one-year-old child to the hospital twice this month because of fevers and a sore throat.

However, Nhuan said that parents should not be overly worried when their children coughed, as it was a natural reflex to help push harmful bacteria out of their lungs.

Parents were advised to only take their children to hospital following prolonged coughing instead, he explained.

Nhuan expressed his concern over parents wrongly removing their children's tonsils as a means of preventing sore throats.

Many children patients, however, just showed slight symptoms of ailments, which doctors said need not to be sent to the hospital.

Some parents were too scared to keep their children at home after a three-year-old girl died of hand-foot-mouth disease in Ha Noi last week, said Tran Minh Dien, deputy director of the hospital.

Only three of nearly 5,000 children who were taken to the hospital for examination must be hospitalised for treatment, he said.

Many viruses caused hand-foot-mouth disease, including the EV71 lethal virus, and only a small number of children got the disease due to the EV71 virus, Dien said.

Generally, children were able to recover from the disease within 5-7 days. The disease became worse in the very few cases of children with weak immune systems, he said.

To get the spread of the disease under control, parents should know its symptoms in order to timely identify when their children showed symptoms, including a high fever for 48-72 hours, vomiting and having at least two shivers within 30 minutes, he said.

Healthy eating, good hygiene practice and keeping children warm were amongst the best ways of preventing illnesses, the doctors said.

Source: VNS

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