The Moscow City News Agency was informed about this by Tatyana Batysheva, a deputy of the Moscow City Duma, director of the Scientific and Practical Center for Children's Psychoneurology of the Moscow Healthcare Department.
“Contrary to initial assumptions, the coronavirus can be dangerous not only for adults, but also for children. How to recognize the danger in time and, most importantly, how to protect our children from it? It has already been confirmed that mild manifestations of general inflammatory and respiratory symptoms predominate in children affected by the coronavirus; changes in the lungs are detected in about half of children with respiratory symptoms. A distinctive feature of coronavirus infection in children can be considered a frequent lesion of the gastrointestinal tract. Only 5.2% of "childhood" cases are severe and only 0.6% are critical. Moreover, the most insidious in its manifestations is the virus for children under three years old. The most dangerous manifestation of COVID-19 can be a multisystem inflammatory syndrome - Kawasaki Syndrome,”Batysheva said.
As the deputy noted, now more than a hundred of his cases have been noted around the world, and the only childhood coronavirus death in Moscow is associated with it - a two-year-old girl died from this complication.
Batysheva spoke in more detail about this disease. “Kawasaki syndrome is named for Japanese pediatrician Tomisaku Kawasaki, who first described the symptoms of the disease in 1967: fever, rash, scaling of the skin, sore eyes, swollen lymph nodes in the neck and a bright red (strawberry) tongue. Then the child was cured, but the cause of the disease remained unknown, it is assumed that the viral infection was the trigger for the atypical immune response of the body,”the parliamentarian clarified.
She added that Kawasaki disease is usually diagnosed mainly in infants and preschoolers under the age of five. “A new dangerous syndrome also occurs in older children, and is also accompanied by high fever, rash, edema, inflammation affecting the skin, eyes, blood vessels and heart, as well as infectious-toxic shock. It is dangerous with damage to the arteries with the possible formation of aneurysms, thrombosis and rupture of the vascular wall. Now there is an alarming increase in children with suspicion of this infrequent disease. Recently, from Europe and North America, there have been reports of groups of children and adolescents requiring admission to intensive care units with symptoms similar to Kawasaki syndrome. So far it has been called multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS-C),”the parliamentarian explained.
According to Tatyana Batysheva, WHO has developed recommendations for making such a diagnosis for children and adolescents - multisystem inflammatory syndrome is suspected when a child has a fever for more than three days and a number of symptoms such as rash, conjunctivitis, mucosal inflammation, hypotension or shock and a number of other symptoms. as well as confirmed coronavirus or contact with infected.
“There is no radical treatment for Kawasaki syndrome yet, only symptomatic - intravenous administration of immunoglobulins and corticosteroids. Most of the patients recover within a few days, but only in a situation where the necessary medical care is provided to the child in the first 10 days of the disease, and this is not a reason to relax, because in the future a patient who has suffered Kawasaki disease then requires at least five years of observation. Remember: the coronavirus epidemic continues. Protect yourself and your children from infection! Maintain social distance, wear masks in public and wash your hands, limit social contact! Our health and the health of our loved ones are in our hands! " - summed up the deputy.