Feverish child? Telling the difference between a virus and something more serious

[sausagerolemodel]

A couple of weeks ago a good friend lost her little boy (2) to meningococcal meningitis. Although he had been ill and had a temperature, he had no early onset rash. Sadly by the time a rash developed and they got him to hospital it was too late.

At the time, even the doctors said had they brought him in earlier he might well have been sent home with paracetamol.

There are no guarantees that you can catch a disease like this which causes such a rapid deterioration in young children, but, you can arm yourself with the information that NICE say that health professionals use when they are trying to make those decisions about feverish children.

The whole guidelines from NICE are on a pdf document here

www.nice.org.uk/nicemedia/pdf/CG47Guidance.pdf

its pretty dense and aimed at healthcare professionals.

I took the "traffic light" (i.e. high/medium/low risk symptoms) table from it and have pasted it here

opheliabottom.wordpress.com/

I hope you find it useful.

I'm so sorry to hear about your friends little boy - wishing her and her family and friends all the courage to get through such a horrible situation

Thank you for posting the traffic light table - I think it's an incredible useful tool. There's been a discussion in site stuff recently on whether there should be a first aid topic - and I raised meningitis as an issue there; I'm going to post a link to your post in that discussion, as I think that you're so right to say that we should be better armed with information about meningitis. I sometimes think that knowing about the rash & tumbler test is putting lives in danger, as it makes you forget about the other warning signs, not to mention that you don't always get the rash (my DD didn't)

Thinking of you all

Thanks Oricella. I know the table is aimed at health care professionals but its my personal opinion, that we (ie, the public) are underestimated (sometimes) in terms of the amount and level of information we understand and are able to use ourselves when it comes to decision making about our children's health.

In cases of fever especially, when even the professionals can find it difficult to make the call, at least we are armed with the information they are making the judgement on too.

Glad you find it useful :-)