It sounds uncomfortably familiar: There is apparently an increase in pneumonia of unknown causes in China. The corona pandemic began with such a report. But it is still unclear what the current news means.
The events in China became known through Promed, an information service of the International Society for Infectious Diseases. He shared a report on the Chinese news site FTV News on Tuesday evening. It says that after numerous cases of children with acute pneumonia, children’s hospitals in Beijing, Liaoning Province and other places are overcrowded.
Patients sometimes have to queue in front of the clinics to be treated. At a pediatric hospital in Dalian, a port city in Liaoning Province, the foyer is full of children receiving infusions.
One of the suspects is the bacterium Mycoplasma pneumoniae
Some schools have been closed. A Beijing resident is quoted as saying: “Many, many are hospitalized. They don’t cough and don’t have any symptoms. They just have a high temperature.” The report also said: Parents wondered if authorities were trying to cover up something.
None of this is precise information, but it was enough to alert experts. The World Health Organization (WHO) immediately called on China to provide more detailed information about the pneumonia cases in the north of the country.
The country is required by the International Health Regulations – a binding treaty under international law – to report outbreaks of infectious diseases with an unknown cause.
The WHO points out that Chinese authorities had already reported an increase in respiratory diseases at a press conference on November 13th. Authorities attributed the increase to the lifting of Covid-19 restrictions. After the strict measures are removed, pathogens such as Sars-CoV-2, influenza viruses, the respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) or the bacterium Mycoplasma pneumoniae circulate more strongly again and encounter a particularly large number of susceptible children. It is not clear whether the reports of increased pneumonia in northern China are part of this already known infection process or represent a new development, wrote the WHO.
In another report, Promed points out that outbreaks of… Mycoplasma pneumoniae-diseases are recorded. The bacterium can cause pneumonia in children and adolescents. However, symptoms usually include coughing, which the Chinese report said did not occur in the current patients.
François Balloux, Professor of Computational Systems Biology at University College London, emphasizes that China is currently experiencing its first complete winter after the strict Corona measures. This could drastically reduce some of the immunity against common pathogens. Other countries also experienced large waves of respiratory infections in children in their first winter without pandemic restrictions. “Given that China experienced a far longer and harsher lockdown than virtually any other country in the world, it was expected that these lockdown exit waves in China could be significant,” says Balloux. As long as there is no new evidence, there is no reason to suspect the emergence of a new pathogen.
David Heymann, an infectious disease expert at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, also points out that infectious diseases are currently in peak season in China. There are many different known pathogens that could be the cause of the current development. They would now have to be tested for.
With material from the British Science Media Center