[ad_1]
Peru launched a national epidemiological alert on Wednesday after detecting the first case of diphtheria in 20 years, amid efforts to contain the coronavirus pandemic, the Health Ministry reported.
“The Hospital 2 de Mayo (in Lima) immediately identified and notified the case to Epidemiology,” Deputy Minister of Health Luis Suárez told reporters.
The patient is a five-year-old girl from the central area of Lima, in whose neighborhood the health authorities will carry out preventive controls among the neighbors to detect other possible cases.
The girl, who was hospitalized, belongs to a family from the Amazon that settled in Lima a year ago who had been vaccinated against diphtheria at birth, but did not receive the following inoculations.
Thus, “She is an unvaccinated girl,” said the vice minister.
Suárez recalled that the last case of this disease -which mainly affects the pharynx and can be fatal in 10% of patients- had been registered in the country in 2000.
Almost three months ago the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) had warned that the covid-19 pandemic was causing a “devastating impact” on health care in Latin America and the Caribbean, and there was a measles outbreak in Brazil and diphtheria cases in Haiti and Venezuela.
Suárez said that diphtheria generally causes “whitish plaques in the upper respiratory system, there is a high fever, pain when swallowing.”
He explained that the disease “can evolve towards a very severe respiratory compromise and with a mortality that can exceed 10%”.
The girl was diagnosed with diphtheria when Peru registers 892,000 cases of coronavirus and 34,000 deaths, in the midst of a slow but steady reduction in new infections and deaths for just over two months.
This last week there is a daily average of 2,626 new coronavirus infections and 55 deaths in the country, compared to the peak of 8,340 new cases and 222 deaths in mid-August, a reduction of 69% and 75%, respectively.
Daily activities have been gradually resuming in the country, after a mandatory national confinement of more than 100 days due to the pandemic, levacuated on July 1, which plunged the country into economic recession.
Diphtheria is an acute disease that – like the coronavirus – is transmitted mainly by secretions from infected people. It is caused by the Klebs-Löffler bacillus (Corynebacterium diphtheriae).
[ad_2]
