Transcription:
Prevention of Highly Contagious Children's Ailments

Melanie Cole (Host): If you’re a parent you know that any number of things can make your child sick and as every parent knows, some illnesses spread from child to child like wildfire. My guest today is Dr. Neela Sethi. She’s a pediatrician and a member of the medical staff at Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital. Dr. Sethi, I’m just going to start with lice. No parent wants to get that letter saying head lice is spotted in the classroom. Tell us about this.

Dr. Neela Sethi (Guest): The thing about lice is it is contagious but it is preventative and it’s so important and it’s very difficult because the age group that generally gets it is school aged children, and guess what? It’s really hard to pin down school aged children and they tend to be the kind of kids that run around and it’s hard to wash their hair really well and it’s really hard to check their hair. It’s so important that you just basically check your children’s hair. First things first, if you’re watching them itch the back of their head or by their ears, it’s a red flag or a warning sign. Back of the head by the ears is a warning sign. Lean them forward and just do a look. If you see things that look like dandruff, take them in. The second thing is, is that you have to make sure that they are cleared before they go back to school. What ends up inevitably happening is people thing, oh we’ll use the over the counter one time and send them back the next day, but guess what, that kills the lice – the lice bugs but it doesn’t kill the nits and the nits are the issues. The nits are the babies. They’re not hatched yet, well then they hatch and then you go through a whole other round and you cycle over and over again. Call your pediatrician, get seen and get on prescription meds that are easy to get and work very efficiently to not only kill lice bugs but kill the nits at the same time and you usually do have to repeat that treatment after a week. You have to take it very seriously, and again, itching at the ears, itching at the neck, red flags.

Host: I wished I talked to you before I went through that and tried everything from mayonnaise on the head with a shower cap and didn’t even know it until it was pretty advanced, so thank you for that great information and red flags. How about another pleasant one, pink eye. What are we looking for in our children? Because kids rub their eyes and then they’re sometimes red, but pink eye is different and icky.

Dr. Sethi: What I tell patients is pink eye is something where you know. You know when you look at your child’s eyes and they’re a little red and then it goes away in a few hours, oh okay they just bumped it or rubbed it. Pink eye is fairly obvious. It gets worse and worse with time, and the key with pink eye is discharge. If you’re noticing that you have – we call them goop in our office for the kids or eye boogers, but if you have goop or eye boogers, you’re having discharge from your lids or you’re waking up in the morning and your kid’s lid is shut, that is pink eye. That is not an allergic reaction. Now if it’s just red, then it could be an allergy, but if there is discharge, there is pink eye. The key with pink eye too is people love to wait. Oh well, you know Johnny woke up this morning and had a crusty eye, but maybe he just rubbed it at night, or maybe it’s not that, guess what they send him to school, they send him to daycare, it’s highly contagious. You have to be the person who breaks the cycle. If you see that discharge in the morning or you see that eye goop, you can still send your kid. Call your pediatrician, nine times out of ten, we can squeeze you in, it’s an eye drop¸ and in 24 hours you’re clear but it breaks the cycle to spread it to other kids.

Host: Hand, foot, and mouth disease, people don’t even know what that is Dr. Sethi. Tell us what it is and how quickly it can spread.

Dr. Sethi: Hand, foot, and mouth is a nasty one. It’s one of my most disliked viruses. So what it is, it’s in the human herpes virus family. That doesn’t mean that – the herpes that you think of when you get older. This is called – it’s HHV. It’s human herpes virus. So it’s a really strong virus in that it gives you very high fevers with no other symptoms other than a sore throat. Now if you’re an older kid you can tell your mom that you have a sore throat, but generally speaking these are in kind of the toddler phase where they’re not really talking, they just get very, very fussy, very high fevers. So 103, 104, that’s very common for hand, foot, and mouth. The second thing that happens is blisters. Blisters in the back of the throat, blisters at the lip. If you see those things, go see your pediatrician because then it spreads from hands and feet. Once it goes to hands and feet, there’s really not much we can do. In fact, it is a virus that we try to catch early and just keep kids out of the daycare setting or out of the school setting because it is highly contagious, but the only way to know is for us to see it and for us to diagnose it. So what I tell parents who panic about this, which I completely understand is, if your kid has a fever of 103 and really does not have a whole lot of other symptoms, come in, just be seen. It takes maybe 15 seconds for us to look at a throat and we can tell you without even testing it if it’s hand, foot, mouth because we see it so often in our practice and we can tell you, hey listen keep your kid home because once those lesions scab over, you’re not contagious but it can take three to five days. So a lot of times people will say, oh my kiddo doesn’t have a fever anymore. Well guess what, that doesn’t mean that you’re not contagious because if those lesions are open and your kid goes and touches another kid, that kid has a chance to catch it.

Host: These are every parent’s worst nightmare all of these things Dr. Sethi. Let’s talk about –

Dr. Sethi: I know, I know.

Host: But you’re giving us such great information. What’s Fifth’s disease?

Dr. Sethi: Fifth’s disease is another type of kind of toddler, sort of young child virus. It’s a virus that causes high fevers and basically like a slack cheek appearance. So what happens is, you look at your child and say, do you have an allergy or did you get into something and it’s really not. It’s just one side of their cheek looks very, very red and then once that redness of their cheek goes away, they get a rash on the rest of their body. Now I will tell parents Fifth’s disease is not that worrisome. It makes your kid cranky, you get a rash, but it can be worrisome to pregnant women and guess what, most kids that get it are in that toddler phase and women are usually having baby number two or three right when their older babies are 15 months or two years old and it can be dangerous to pregnant women. So it’s very important to know what it is because that baby has got to stay away from mama if possible because it can lead to birth defects in pregnancy women. That’s the reason that we shout from the rooftops to be really careful when your child has a red cheek and you’ll notice that this is kind of an ongoing thing and sort of something that we say all the time, but just come in. We see so many babies in a day and so many toddlers in a day, and the way that we can help you is if you’re in the office, and we tell patients all the time. We can’t help you if you don’t come, but if you come there are so many things that we can do to help you diagnose and to help prevent spread.

Host: Another letter no parent wants to get from the school is strep throat. Strep throat has been – you know a child has been diagnosed with strep throat. What are the symptoms, the red flags? I as a parent, Dr. Sethi, don’t even really mind strep throat because you know once you get the antibiotic they’ll feel better. It’s when you’re told it’s a virus and it’s not strep then you’re like, ugh. But what are the red flags that we’re supposed to watch out for?

Dr. Sethi: I think the most important thing with strep that we tell parents is listen you’re right, if we can diagnose strep and give you a course of antibiotics, you’ll feel better soon. It’s a quick way to get better. It’s not a bad bug if it’s treated correctly and it’s treated effectively and early. The thing that’s scary about strep is, not to panic parents, but it can travel to other places of the body. It can go to the heart, it can go to the lungs, it can go to the kidneys, and when it goes to those places, it can wreak havoc. So what’s really important is to remember that if your child has a sore throat, and you can give them a day or two with strep. It’s not like you have to treat it within the first give minutes of them getting symptoms because truth be told, if we test too early it won’t pull up positive, but if your child has a sore throat and it is not getting better and the second part of that is that your child is not getting a cold, meaning all of us know that our kid comes home and says, “I have a sore throat,” and then two days later they end up having a runny nose, then guess what, and their sore throat is better, then we know oh that was just postnasal drip, the standard for the first phase of a virus. But if your child is getting a sore throat and not getting better or has fevers with that sore throat or is really lethargic, you know, meaning parents are saying gosh you know Johnny was playing just fine and then all of a sudden he has just been really down, or if they get a rash. Now this rash is a specific type of rash because it feels like sandpaper. You’ll run your hands up and down their chest and it’ll feel prickly. Those are some symptoms that you’ll want to come in for. High fevers, or even just fevers over 101, sore throat that’s not going away, sandpapery rash, lethargy, those are things that you want to come in and get swabbed for.

Host: Wow, that’s great advance, Dr. Sethi. Now, before we wrap up today. What about sports? Anything you’d like to recommend about keeping safe in germ filled gyms and locker rooms because there are some things that are also not vaccine preventable diseases and icky things going around in the gyms like MRSA, and what do you want us to know about those?

Dr. Sethi: I think if I could scream it from the rooftops, but it’s this tricky situation of teenagers. Now everybody loves a teenager, but are they the most hygienic? Absolutely not, they’re not, so you have to make sure to wash your sports equipment. You have to. You have to force them to bring their sports equipment home, wash it in hot water, and that is hot water, hot water and dry it at least every other wear. I know that sounds like a lot but at least every other wear. Same with their equipment. The equipment should be sprayed down with some sort of antibacterial spray every use. Give it to your child, have them spray it down and put it in their locker, and then hand washing. So much of what we talked about today is prevented with proper hand washing. It’s something that is so basic and so easy, but so often forgotten. I know that 90% of the reason that I stay healthy in the winter months is because I am ridiculous about washing my hands. So making sure that your teens are washing their hands. Also, I tell my teens to hop in the shower when they get home from their sports events. There’s no reason why they should be running around, sweating, having an interaction with a bunch of other teens, and then sitting on your couch without washing their hands, because guess what, bacteria likes to live on surfaces. There’s no reason why they can’t finish what they’re doing, get home, and get in the shower with hot water and soak their body head to toe. That decreases contagiousness for some of these really big bad bugs because they can’t stand soap and water, which is crazy. So we win if we just do our basic things that our mommy and daddy taught us, which is wash our hands, don’t pick your nose, don’t touch your face, wash your hands definitely before you eat and make sure you take a warm shower and soap your body head to toe every night. These are very basic but very easy things to do to prevent communicable diseases.

Host: What a great segment and what great information Dr. Sethi for every parent to hear, really truly that hand washing, showering, and some basic cleanliness can help to stave away some of these really icky things that parents don’t want to have to deal with but at some point we all do. Thank you again for joining us and explaining some of the ways that we can identify and hopefully prevent some of these. You’re listening to It’s Your Health Radio with Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital. For more information, please visit henrymayo.com, that’s henrymayo.com. This is Melanie Cole, thanks so much for tuning in.