Infant Mortality Fever
  It is important that everyone understands the term considered infant mortality fever. Children older than 10 years generally suffer the same symptoms as adults, but among younger children the symptoms sometimes differ considerably. Youngsters get flu more often than any other age group, but they usually are afflicted with a mild form of it that may be dismissed as merely a feverish cold. When children do contract full-blown flu, their fever usually exceeds the normal adult range, running higher than 102° F. They frequently suffer diarrhea or vomiting as well as the characteristic flu cough, but they generally escape the muscle aches that plague their elders. Children suffer fewer complications than adults, but those that they do contract can occur suddenly and be quite serious: a dangerous fever (above 104° F.), pneumonia, convulsions and severe croup, which threatens breathing.
Any of these may require immediate hospitalization. Doctors usually confirm a diagnosis of influenza, not with laboratory tests, but simply by determining whether a flu epidemic is raging in the community. Influenza unlike colds, which are relatively capricious in their choice of victims typically races through businesses, schools, churches and other community groups. Isolated cases of flu are so rare that, if you develop flu-like symptoms but find yourself alone in your suffering, you can be reasonably sure that you have something else. By the same token, if you have mild flu symptoms while friends and co-workers around you are also sick, you probably have influenza. Hence this leads to a fairly high infant mortality fever death rate.
Individual flu cases occur in every month of the year and throughout the world, regardless of climate, but epidemics usually are seasonal. In temperate countries, they are most common in the dead of winter January through March in the Northern Hemisphere, June through August in the Southern one. Virologists believe that indoor crowding and decreased ventilation during winter play a part in this schedule, as they do in colds. But they also attribute flu’s seasonal timing to changes in humidity. Flu viruses thrive in relatively dry air, with a humidity between 15 and 40 per cent the range maintained by most central-heating systems.
Unfortunately, this evidence about epidemics does not mean that individual families can defend themselves against flu by in- stalling humidifiers. Even in the most humid environment, enough of the hardy virus particles survive to infect people. Although a humidifier will not decrease susceptibility to influenza during the flu season, one set up in a sickroom may ease a flu sufferer’s discomfort. This is key in understanding infant mortality fever.
An epidemic usually lasts less than two months, and departs as suddenly as it arrives. In the general population, the infection rate typically is between 10 and 40 per cent; in institutional populations such as boarding schools, the rate sometimes climbs to 75 per cent. But strangely enough, despite this virulence, epidemics move on without striking the entire pool of susceptible people a result, scientists theorize, of some nonspecific resistance that whole communities develop and share. |
