A mother from Ohio, US, has revealed her healthy teenage son was just hours away from brain damage after he was struck by the same pneumonia that is ravaging China and Europe.
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William McCarren, 14, was rushed to hospital on Wednesday after coming home from school “crying and holding his chest” and saying he could “barely breathe”, his mother Mollee Campbell told the DailyMail.
He was very pale and was having difficulty staying awake, he was acting like he was going to faint,” she added.
When he arrived at the emergency room, doctors told him that William’s lungs were so full of fluid that they were depriving his body and organs of oxygen. If his oxygen levels had dropped, he could have suffered brain damage, his mother explained, holding back tears.
William was diagnosed with mycoplasma, the bacterial infection at the center of pneumonia outbreaks in China and several European countries. He is one of about 140 children in Warren County, Ohio, who have the lung disease.
The cases are so numerous that they “meet the definition of an epidemic,” doctors say. Warren County health officials said Thursday they have treated an “extremely high” number of children with pneumonia, 145 cases since August.
The average patient is about 8 years old and no deaths have been reported, but the number of patients is unusual.
Mycoplasma is a bacterial infection that causes outbreaks about every five years but rarely makes headlines because cases are mild and deaths are extremely rare.
The difference this time, experts told the DailyMail, is that children’s immunity is low following lockdowns, school closures and mask mandates.
The bacterial infection is also believed to be behind the outbreak in China that has overwhelmed children’s hospitals in the north.
It is also the cause of cases and deaths in certain regions of Europe, particularly the Netherlands and Denmark.
However, doctors stressed that the outbreaks were not due to the transmission of infections from one country to another.