Poss mild case of swine flu in toddler - annoyed by unclear advice

[alittleteapot]

dd woke up at 4am asking for a bottle of milk which she promptly threw up (along with her spaghetti bolognese). She was then awake for two hours and threw up again once. Her temperature was up - 39 at highest point. She was pretty perky in herself. DP did the online assessment and she was issued with a tamiflu issue number - which I felt was inappropriate given her symptoms could be any number of things and she was ok in herself.

This morning she's very well in herself. Had breakfast, no vomiting, but still temp of 38.5. Tbh prob would have ignored it if not for fact that we have a new baby and I have high risk underlying health issues. DP spoke to the pandemic flu hotline to follow up the tamiflu advice given online over night. Turns out that's just a woman filling in the online form for you so same thing. She said ring GP which he did. (he's also got a raised temp btw and one dose of diarrhoea - feeling lousy but a bit manflu imo - no other symptoms) GP wanted to see DD so they went down and he examined her. He said three things.

1. She should take ibuprofen instead of calpol as was better. Don't know why...

1. Did we want to give her tamiflu - to which DP said he was hoping the doctor would give his opinion on this. Doc said prob not and that he thought there should be two levels of swine flu advice depending on level of symptoms.

1. He then said DD should have the vaccine when it came out. To which I said to DP if this is it mildly then she won't need the vaccine. Unfortunately DP feeling too ill to be on top of asking the right questions so I think I'll phone back...

...but just wanted to rant on here a bit first. whole thing seems very confused. why can't they test her? any other thoughts?

Seems to make perfect sense to me (except for the ibuprofen bit, not sure about that) - the reason they can't test her is that if they tested everyone who might have it, the labs would be backed up for months - they just can't do it. It might not be the sort of response from the GP we'd be happy with if a child had a normal or rarer illness, but this isn't that situation - this is a mass public health situation where we're mostly going to get 'one size fits all' advice without much individual investigation first. That's what happens when you have a pandemic - medical services are stretched and you just have to hope you don't need anything unusual. Some people will get Tamiflu who won't really have needed it; some people will be vaccinated who've already had SF (unless they get private testing first perhaps); and some people without SF but with similar symptoms may be overlooked if they can't get through to busy GPs. So you may not ever know whether your dd and dp have had it, all you can do is guess really based on how many of the symptoms match.

Ibuprofen is often better than paracetamol (Calpol) at reducing temperature.

Thanks. Yes I can see that in a pandemic they have to treat the herd not the individual but I still reckon they could come up with a slightly more sophisticated criteria for when to issue tamiflu. Today dd's only symptom has been a raised temperature and she's been on fine form in herself. Given the latest evidence about the severity of some side effects of tamiflu and also of its limited use in reducing severity of symptoms (reducing length rather than severity) it seems inappropriate in a case like this. (GP said as much today.)

Fingers crossed having said that she doesn't become worse tomorrow.

Not a medic, but sounds v similar to a virus both my dds had a few weeks ago - few hours of vomiting, high temp for a day, then less for another day, then tired but fine. No cold symptoms, sore throats, or coughs - I'm sure it wasn't SF.

Ibuprofen is better at reducing fever, and lasts longer than paracetamol (calpol).

On the vaccine front, did he say why?

I think it IS very confusing, SF, and lots of GPs are not surprisingly confused too!

Ibuprofen is not good for the tummy.If any sort of upset tummy then paracetamol is better

Although I asked my GP (I trust her) about this, she said for a viral tummy bug ibuprofen was fine.