Health departments in Massachusetts and Ohio are reporting cases of “white lung pneumonia” in children similar to the outbreak spreading in China and parts of Europe.
Warren County, 30 miles outside Cincinnati, reported 142 pediatric cases of white lung pneumonia.
The term “white lung” refers to the chest X-rays of patients diagnosed with the bacterial infection.
“Not only is this above the county average, it also meets the Ohio Department of Health definition of an outbreak,” the county’s health department said Wednesday.
Doctors in western Massachusetts are seeing “a whole lot” of walking pneumonia, a milder form of the lung condition, caused by mycoplasma pneumoniae bacteria.
The first reports of a mystery pneumonia affecting children in China began circulating on Nov. 21.
Emergency rooms in northern China have been overwhelmed with pediatric patients. So far, the disease doesn’t seem to affect adults.
Doctors in the U.S. say the outbreaks are not caused by a new virus and the pneumonia cases are the result of a mixture of seasonal bacterial and viral bugs all hitting at once.
A source at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) told DailyMail.com that, nationally, “nothing is out of the ordinary”.
The CDC said mycoplasma pneumoniae bacteria transmission is prevented by good hygiene (hand washing).
