4 month skin blemish/rash

[Jayprice1985]

HI,

My 4 month old son has come out in this slight rash 3 days ago. My wife took him to out of hours GP due to advice from 111 and they said it was nothing to worry about such as meningitis but they didn’t know what it was.

We went for a follow up appointment the next day at our own GP who used to work in paediatrics at the hospital and she ruled out meningitis and said he had dry skin, and its nothing to worry about. It’s not even viral.

Baby is fine, he is himself, his temperate is fine, he’s happy and playful, feeding and pooing and weeing, but has anyone’s baby had something similar?

This looks the same as ds had at about 10 weeks old.
Luckily for me it came out when I was out with dd1 and friends, and one of the parents was a GP, so they did full check up on him within minutes of me noticing.
He was lively and clearly nothing wrong at all, so she said if he'd been showing any signs of being even slightly not quite right, then he should have gone to A&E, but he was so clearly fine there didn't seem much point.
However he had a blood test the next week just to rule out any possibilities of anything nasty. She said as it had cleared and he was so well it was pretty much a formality.

There were two possibilities which we never really cleared which it was, one was something about the temperature-he was in a sling at the time with bare legs. The other possibility was a viral rash.

Warning though, it did repeat, whichever it was.
He was regularly sent to A&E with a viral rash until he was about 2.6yo. Not always the same, we had the interesting one that started on the head and we could watch coming out all over his body moving downwards, the big red blotchy ones that looked really alarming, little pin pricks, and various others. Most of them didn't fade under a glass, hence being sent to A&E. He occasionally gets them now, but much less so.
The cold one, if it was that, only came one other time, when he was in a swimming pool about 9 months, and his legs started blotching again, and I rushed him out and warmed him up, and it faded quickly.

Basically if it is meningitis he will be noticeably unwell before the rash comes out, so if he's looking alert, then there isn't much danger of that.
However if ever concerned go straight to A&E-the GP often sent me with him and one of his rashes, so it's not an overreaction.