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Indonesia heightens monitoring in response to ‘mysterious pneumonia’ outbreak in China
The Health Ministry has issued a circular urging health workers to closely monitor respiratory cases at their respective facilities and regularly report the data to authorities.
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Children and their parents wait in an outpatient area of a children’s hospital in Beijing on Nov. 23, 2023. China has reported an increase this year in “influenza-like illness”. (AFP/Jade Gao)
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he Health Ministry has instructed healthcare professionals across the country to increase their monitoring of cases of respiratory illnesses following a recent outbreak of “mysterious pneumonia” in northern China.
Since mid-October, authorities have been reporting higher levels of “influenza-like illness” in northern China compared to the same periods in the past three years, according to a report by the World Health Organization (WHO). Chinese health authorities have also reported clusters of pneumonia in children up to 40 percent above the norm, although it is unclear whether the two observations are related.
The United Nations health body is currently seeking more information on the reports, including laboratory results and recent data on the spread of respiratory illness, from Chinese health authorities following reports about clusters of an “undiagnosed pneumonia”.
The initial reports came from the Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases (ProMed), a public system run by the International Society for Infectious Diseases.
The WHO has yet to determine the cause of the outbreak, but Chinese authorities told the press last week that the respiratory illness spike was a result of the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions and the circulation of known pathogens such as influenza, SARS-CoV-2, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and Mycoplasma pneumoniae.
Mycoplasma pneumonia typically affects younger children, causing a cough and sore throat. The infection is usually mild, and for this reason, doctors sometimes call it “walking pneumonia”.
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