2023-05-05 14:19:00
Doctors caught the fifth case of diphtheria in the Czech Republic this year. The State Health Institute (SZÚ) informed about this in a press release today. In the skin form, it manifests itself as painful swellings or poorly healing ulcers, in the respiratory form as severe angina with narrowing of the pharynx or larynx. The disease, against which children are vaccinated in the mandatory hexavaccine, reappeared in the country last April after 27 years, there were five cases. Experts point out that protection after vaccination is not lifelong. Collective immunity mainly protects against infection, which arises when 80 percent of the population is vaccinated.
People can infect each other through the air when inhaling droplets from a sick person or from skin lesions. This year, the SZÚ registers four patients with the skin form of the disease and one with its respiratory form. He was the first patient an elderly man with weakened immunity from the Olomouc region who suffered from a non-healing leg ulcer. In February, doctors confirmed the respiratory form of the infection in a boy from the Pardubice region, in April a middle-aged man in Prague and a boy from the Moravian-Silesian region were added.
“This week the NRL confirmed a skin form of diphtheria caused by Corynebacterium ulcerans in an elderly patient from the Vysočina region,” said Jana Zavadilová, head of the National Reference Laboratories (NRL) for pertussis and diphtheria at the SZÚ. This is the second case in Vysočina since the return of diphtheria last year.
Contagion from a pet
The patient is from Vysočina hospitalized in the infectious disease department and treated with antibiotics, persons, who have been in contact with the infected should monitor their health status. According to the director of the regional hygiene station, Jan Pečinka, the probable source of the infection a cat or dog kept by a sick man. The bacterium is commonly found in soil, transmission from animal to human is considered rare by experts.
“Increased number of detected cases (…) in field laboratories it is probably also due to the introduction of better diagnostics of infectious pathogens, which include corynebacteria. Thanks to this, even more captured samples can be sent to the NRL for confirmation,” said Kateřina Fabiánová, deputy head of the department of epidemiology of infectious diseases at the SZÚ.
The disease can damage the heart and kidneys
The symptoms of the disease have different formsthere is fever, weakness and sore throat with reddened tonsils and swollen lymph nodes. Skin manifestations are painless non-healing ulcers. Most often with diphtheria but manifests as a severe sore throat with gray spots in the throat, which lead to narrowing of the larynx and pharynx and suffocation. Toxins from bacteria can break through without treatment into the bloodstream and damage the heart, kidneys or nervous system.
In Czechia children are vaccinated with the hexavaccine, which is also against whooping cough, jaundice B, tetanus, Heamophillus influenzae type b bacteria and polio, after the ninth week of the newborn’s life with two doses with an interval of two months and another dose between the eleventh and thirteenth months of life.
They are then vaccinated again against diphtheria in combination with the vaccine against tetanus and whooping cough at five to six years and again at ten to 11 years. Czech experts proposed an optional revaccination in the spring of last year in accordance with international recommendations. But it has not been approved yet.
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