Author Topic: China Faces New Mysterious Pneumonia Outbreak. WHO Requests More Info (Read 1393 times)

kevindavis007 · « **on:** November 25, 2023, 06:56:52 pm »

“Mysterious” and “pneumonia” are two words that you typically don’t want to see together. Recently, clusters of “mysterious pneumonia” cases have emerged among children in Northern China. The mystery is that the causes of these pneumonia cases are still unknown.

The World Health Organization has to take any such outbreak very seriously as evidenced by, you know, the whole Covid-19 pandemic thing. That’s why the WHO has officially requested more information from China’s government on what a WHO statement described as a recent “increase in respiratory illnesses and reported clusters of pneumonia in children” in the country. This doesn’t mean that you should start using the P-word again and start hoarding rolls of toilet tissue. But the situation does warrant close monitoring.

China has already been experiencing an upswing of respiratory illnesses in general. Northern China has had increases in influenza-like illnesses since mid-October that have topped the numbers from the prior three years. Back on November 13, 2023, Chinese authorities from the National Health Commission blamed this upswing on their lifting of Covid-19 restrictions and the spread of rather familiar pathogens like influenza, Mycoplasma pneumoniae, respiratory syncytial virus, and, of course, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). China does have some surveillance systems in place to track the rates of these different pathogens. But they don’t necessarily make numbers from these systems publicly available.

More: https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2023/11/23/china-experiencing-mysterious-pneumonia-outbreak-who-requests-more-info/?sh=2692b4629165