KABUL (SW) – With the dropping temperatures, respiratory diseases among children are hitting new dangerous levels, warned health experts.
Mohammad Arif Hassanzai, the head of the children’s internal medicine department at Sehat-e-Tfeil Hospital in Kabul, told Salam Watandar that on an average day, up to 250 children under the age of five with respiratory diseases and pneumonia are brought to this hospital for treatment.
“Every day, about 200 to 300 patients who are suffering from respiratory diseases visit this hospital, not all of them can be hospitalized. We have 20 to 30 hospitalized patients every day.”
Zohra Bayat, a mother whose eight-month-old child has had pneumonia since two weeks, said her child has lost appetite and he also developed a severe cough. “When we took him to the doctor, the doctor recommended him medicine and said that he had pneumonia.”
Zahra Amiri, another mother whose two children have been suffering from pneumonia since 20 days, said she has two twin children, both of them had a severe cold two or three weeks ago. “We took them to the doctor, he gave them syrup. But it didn’t have any effect, their cough became very severe.”
Meanwhile, Kazem Asadi, a doctor in the children’s department, said that pneumonia is one of the common diseases among children under five years of age, whose prominent symptoms are fever, cough, and shortness of breath.
About the ways to prevent pneumonia in children, he said healthy children should be kept away from children who have pneumonia, and children should be vaccinated on time. He said if a child gets this disease, he should be fed properly and healthy and should be taken to the doctor as soon as possible.
According to the statistics, in November 2022, 6,700 children with respiratory diseases and pneumonia were brought to hospital, and in November 2021, 3,700 children with these diseases were brought to this hospital.
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