From: Linda Roochvarg, MD
February 01,2009
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Wintertime is the height of the respiratory illness season. It seems like you or your child just finishes with cold symptoms and once again you are faced with another episode. How do you distinguish between a cold and a more serious illness? How do you make this distinction in your child? First, a cold or upper respiratory infection (URI) is a viral illness and its symptoms can be caused by more than 200 different viruses. Viral illnesses CANNOT be successfully treated with antibiotics and thus, left untreated, they naturally will run their course and typically will improve after 7 to 10 days (sometimes up to two weeks). An estimated 1 billion URIs occur annually in the United States. The average child gets 3 to 8 colds per year and the average adult gets 2 to 3 episodes. What’s more, most of these colds occur in the winter months. So if your child seems to be sick all winter, you are probably correct; the cold lasts 1½ to 2 weeks times 8 episodes = 12 to 16 weeks of illness. You are right—that is the entire winter.
As you can see from the chart, the typical URI includes fever, sore throat, cough and nasal drainage. If your symptoms vary significantly from this chart, you should contact your physician. For example, the fever (101 degrees Fahrenheit or higher in a person older than 2 years of age) may last 2, 3 or 4 days. If it persists longer, give your doctor a call because there may be something else going on besides the URI. Likewise, call the doctor for a sore throat that continues for more than 5 days. One question that often arises relates to the color of the nasal discharge. During the course of a normal viral illness, you or your child can have 3 to 5 days of awful-looking, yellow-green nasal discharge. Those get better on their own and do not need antibiotics. If that purulent discharge goes on more than 7 to 10 days, contact your doctor. Resistance to antibiotics is created when they are over prescribed and/or are taken incorrectly. We have a lot of antibiotic resistance in this community and therefore the last thing we want is to take antibiotics unnecessarily. We want the antibiotics to work when we truly need them, like when a bacterial infection is present. So take heart, the cold season is upon us. Remember, wash your hands, stay home if you are ill so you won’t infect other people, drink plenty of fluids and contact your doctor if your symptoms are more than what you now know are typical for an upper respiratory infection.
Written by:
Linda B. Roochvarg, MD Fellow, American Academy of Pediatrics |
