Four children and young people are currently hospitalized with multisystem inflammatory syndrome after contracting the coronavirus.
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One of them, a 15-year-old boy, is in serious but stable condition at Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer. According to the hospital, the teen arrived suffering from serious complications from the virus.
Over the past three weeks, six children were hospitalized with MIS-C at Rambam Medical Center in Haifa. One of them, a six-year-old girl, was hooked up to a ventilator at the hospital's intensive-care unit. The other children were in moderate condition. All six have since been sent home in good condition.
Three of the six children were sent to Rambam Medical Center from other hospitals after doctors suspected they were suffering from appendicitis after reporting severe stomach pain. The center warned that two of the children did not respond to accepted treatment methods and improved only upon receiving treatment with experimental biomedicine used to treat arthritis.
103 cases since the outbreak of the pandemic
MIS-C symptoms include persistent fever, decreased blood pressure, digestive issues, difficulty breathing, and even myocarditis and increased inflammation indices.
According to the Israeli Pediatric Association, 103 cases have been reported since the outbreak of the pandemic. Experts believe Israel will have reached 150 cases by the end of the fourth wave.
"In recent weeks, we've had six cases of MIS-C, who were between the ages of six and 10. [These were] Young people, younger than what we saw in earlier waves, probably because children aged 12 and over have already been vaccinated," Dr. Yonatan Butbul, a pediatrician and rheumatology expert at Rambam Medical Center said.
He noted: "Some of the children experienced a significant decrease in blood pressure and needed support. Some of them suffered from respiratory failure … They suffered from an increase in inflammatory indices, an increase in myocardial enzymes that indicate cardiac damage. Some of them were in a hazy state. Some had diarrhea and severe stomach pain. These were kids that looked really bad, sunken in, with borderline blood pressure, who quickly deteriorated."
According to Butbul, all of the children had either been diagnosed with the coronavirus or in quarantine earlier on. The patients did not experience anything beyond minor coronavirus symptoms if any, and only developed the multisystem inflammatory syndrome upon recovery.
He said that while only a small percentage of infected children had gone on to develop the syndrome, "the coronavirus can lead to severe illness. We need to be careful, to wear masks and avoid infection. We certainly should not be going and getting intentionally infected because there could be repercussions of serious illness we still don't know the long-term effect of."
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