CHILDREN’S HEALTH: FREQUENT ILLNESSES

Posted: April 28th, 2009 | Author: admin | Filed under: General health | No Comments »

Parents often become concerned that their children are ill too frequently. Sometimes the parents are right, and the child does have some underlying medical problem. But, normally, having many illnesses is not due to any particular problem in the child. Usually, how often a child becomes ill depends on the number of children in the family and the number of diseases each child is exposed to.

Except for accidents and allergies, 95 percent of all illnesses are caused by germs that live exclusively in humans. Most children’s illnesses are caught from other children. Whether a child will catch a disease depends on two factors: whether the child is exposed to the germ and how strong the child’s resistance is.

If your child is frequently ill with different minor illnesses, the illnesses are usually due simply to exposure to many people. As soon as a child begins going to daycare or school, the child is exposed to other children with illnesses. The number of children in a household also is a factor. Mathematically, a four-child family could have 16 times as many childhood illnesses as a one-child family.

A child frequently ill with the same illness may have a defect of local resistance (a lowered resistance to disease in one area of the body). For example, repeated pneumonia in the same part of a lung suggests an abnormality in that area.

A child with frequent major illnesses or frequent complications of minor sicknesses may have a general lack of resistance. This occurs with immune mechanism defects, which hinder the child’s ability to fight infectious diseases. For instance, colds that always end up as croup, bronchiolitis, bronchitis, or pneumonia may indicate an underlying allergy.

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