What to Do About Recurring Illnesses
Advice for Parents
If your pediatrician can't diagnose the cause of your child's vomiting, consider consulting a pediatric gastroenterologist.
Strep Throat
If your child keeps getting sick with strep throat, it's possible they never fully recovered the first time, or that they've been repeatedly exposed to the illness. Strep throat can affect people of all ages, but it's most common in children ages 5 to 15.13 It causes inflammation and pain in the throat, and symptoms can include sudden high fever, sore throat with red or white patches, headache, chills, and swollen lymph nodes in the neck.
Strep throat can spread from one person to another by sneezing, coughing, sharing utensils, or by close contact with someone who had an infection.
What's Normal
One episode a year.
What's Not Normal
Drooling or great difficulty swallowing.
Why Your Child Might Be Vulnerable to Strep Throat
Some kids with strep—a bacterial infection of the tonsils caused by highly contagious Streptococcus pyogenes bugs—don't respond to the first course of antibiotics prescribed by a doctor. So even though these kids have been
treated, the infection never gets knocked out. Some children need longer treatment to get rid of the strep bacteria; others, a different antibiotic.
Sometimes kids come in close contact with a carrier who has no symptoms but can pass the infection along. And if your child gets their first infection during peak strep season (spring and fall), they're more likely to become reinfected, because bacteria thrive during those months.
Parents may contribute to repeat infections, too. Strep symptoms heal quickly with treatment, leading many parents to stop giving medication early. But full treatment is necessary to wipe out all of the strep bacteria.
Doctors are swift to treat strep throat in order to prevent rare yet serious complications such as heart-damaging rheumatic fever. But the most accurate test—a throat culture—takes two days to yield results. A rapid antigen test offers results in minutes but can fail to detect strep some of the time. For these reasons, doctors may over-diagnose and overprescribe antibiotics to be on the safe side.
