What are the prevention and management aspects of common childhood diseases

The prevention and management of common childhood diseases is essentially centered on the four core directions of "preventing the disease, recognizing the initial disease, managing the disease, and adjusting the underlying disease." There are no unreachable professional thresholds. They are all trivial things that community child care providers, kindergarten health doctors, and parents can cooperate with on a daily basis.

Take the daily work of child care in our community as an example. We are currently busy with the prevention and control of respiratory diseases in autumn and winter. Preventing the disease is not as simple as urging parents to get vaccinated. The plan must be adjusted according to the situation of each child: children with allergies should check the allergen level in advance. Those with dust mite allergy level 4 or above should just remove the mite roots once a week as stated on the Internet. It is not enough. Washing the bedding twice a week and using a mite remover every other day is not enough. Most babies who have just entered the kindergarten do not dare to raise their hands to ask for water. We will remind parents to bring graduated cups for their babies and ensure that they drink 300ml of warm water every day. Otherwise, the dry weather in autumn and winter will make the respiratory mucosa as fragile as a dried paper shell, and it will be easy for the virus to invade. There is now a lot of controversy about this part on the Internet. For example, should we give our children daily use of no-rinse disinfectant gel? One group of parenting bloggers say that they should be disinfected at all times to prevent diseases from entering the mouth, while the other group says that using too much will destroy immunity. Our front-line consensus is based on different scenarios: it is okay to use it when there is no running water outside, but try not to use it at home if you can wash your hands with water. Long-term and frequent use will not only destroy the baby's skin barrier, but also reduce his chance of contact with normal flora in the environment, and will more easily induce intestinal flora disorders.

Of course, no matter how careful the prevention is, it is impossible to prevent the baby from getting sick completely. At this time, the value of early identification becomes highlighted. Last month, a grandmother came to the emergency department with her baby suffering from fever. She said that she saw the baby's runny nose the day before, and she gave her children's cold medicine for two days. Unexpectedly, the fever suddenly reached 39.8 degrees in the middle of the night, and she was diagnosed with influenza A. In fact, many parents can't tell the difference between common colds and influenza in the early stage. Just remember a small detail: the fever of common colds usually does not exceed 38.5 degrees, and the child's mental state will not be greatly affected, and he should play and eat. Influenza is a sudden high temperature above 39 degrees, and the child will not even want to open his eyes to watch his favorite cartoons. If you have this signal, don't carry it at home and go for a screening immediately. There are also many parents who give cough medicine to their baby when they hear it. In fact, if the baby has bad breath, bloated stomach, and dry stool at the same time, the cough is mostly caused by food accumulation. Cut out two meat meals and eat something light first, which is much more effective than cough medicine.

If you are diagnosed with illness, the core of management is not to "quickly eliminate symptoms", but to avoid complications. Take the most common rotavirus diarrhea, for example. Many parents rush to give antidiarrheal medicine when they see their baby. Instead, the virus will be blocked in the intestines, and in severe cases, it can induce intussusception. We usually teach parents to check the urine output first: if the baby has not peeed for four hours, it means that he is dehydrated and needs to come to the hospital immediately. Oral rehydration salts should be given first at home, which is more symptomatic than any antidiarrheal medicine. There is also a conflict of ideas in this part. The elders always say that if you have diarrhea, you need to be hungry to rest your stomach. Now the latest guideline is that as long as the baby is willing to eat, light millet porridge and steamed apples can be fed normally. Just don’t give greasy or sweet ones. Complete fasting will make the baby dehydrated faster.

If your child always gets sick frequently, such as catching colds twice a month and bronchitis three times in half a year, don’t rush to buy health care products that claim to “increase immunity”. First, find out the basic background of your child’s body. Last year, there was a 4-year-old child in our district who suffered from pneumonia twice in half a year. The final investigation revealed that he was severely allergic to cow's milk protein. He had been drinking ordinary milk powder. The long-term allergic reaction made the respiratory mucosa particularly fragile. After switching to deeply hydrolyzed milk powder, he didn't go to the hospital for more than half a year. To put it bluntly, the prevention and management of common children's diseases has never been a one-way "doctor's request and parents' implementation". It must be flexibly adjusted according to each child's constitution before it can be truly implemented.