 Good morning everyone. I'm Dr. Pani Bhushan, head of the Department of Pediatrics and Neuroscience at Manipal Hospital, Leshampur. Dear friends, we've been seeing a lot of infections in the last three weeks. Almost every child who goes to the school helping getting annual and community operation departments in the hospitals and nurse opportunities. So I thought I'll just brief a little about what these illnesses are. When should you be worried? When should you go to the hospital? When can you relax and wait? So basically the 90-95% of the infections have been viral respiratory tract infections. Meaning a virus has bothered the nurse throat and your child is having high-grade fevers and cough. What we have been observing is the fevers are very high-grade. It is lasting about two to three days and by day three to day four the fever seems to be settling down. Which means the fever still stays but the frequency comes down. Which means instead of coming every once in four hours or six hours, now the fever is... Now there's a gap of more than six hours or eight hours in between the fevers. So if your child on day three looks reasonably cheerful than what he or she was on day one, day two, number one. Number two, if the fever frequency has come down, which means the gap between the fevers has increased. You probably can relax a little but the cough what we are saying is the cough tends to stay for about a week, ten days and longer. And most of the cough syrups have not been greatly effective at this point in time. But two things are very important. There are no high-grade fevers accompanying into day three, day four. And two, if there is no breathing difficulty, if your child is comfortably breathing, otherwise looking alert and happy. And cough is the only issue which is no one can happen. You don't have to get too panicky about it. So absence of fever and no breathing difficulty, just light cough, a simple cough syrup would do. This is number one. 90% of them would come into this category. But some children who are known to wheeze can have a little more, what to say, troublesome set of symptoms. Or some children tend to wheeze with viral infections. There is a difference between them. Most children can have wheeze and that doesn't necessarily mean they are asthmatic children. Basically what it means is when there is a bad viral infection, some children have wheezing. And as a result of which they can be breathing difficulty. So a good number of children this particular season have been wheezing along with viral infection too. So such children may need some kind of a nebulization help or some medicine to open up their airways. So if your pediatrician is prescribing some kind of a nebulizer, do not get too anxious about it. The illness is such, usually it's a period of five or seven days and they should get better after that. And as I again said, fever and breathing difficulty should make you comfortable in hospital. Now this is also a seasonal thingy, not meaning to scare you. Just in case if the fever goes into day three, day four and the frequency doesn't seem to be coming down. There is not much of cough and cold. And more importantly, three important things to remember. If your kid looks too tired or there is a bad headache or a bad tummy ache, please come to the hospital. It's important that a pediatrician reviews your child, sees if he or needs a blood test to rule out a possible dengue infection. So fever persisting into day three, day four along with that being too tired. Tiredness is very, very important and classical. A lot of headache goes with the dengue and the tummy ache. If these three things are there into day three, day four of illness, it's always safe to get a pediatrician's review. It could be still a viral infection of a throat but nevertheless it is safer to do so. So we have had viral or respiratory tract infections, then we have had wheezing associated respiratory tract infections and a small number of dengue infections, which is important to be ruled out in the fever, stays on with their day times. Number four, I think a good number of children are also having hand foot and mortises. You may have seen in the television of the WhatsApp groups spreading the message. This is a milder illness. Basically if you see any kind of rashes over the palm and the soaps or sometimes outside in the mouth, it is very characteristic of hand foot and mortises. The good thing about this is it's a very mild illness, very mild rate of fever, but the rashes can linger on for about five days. Some children may have a difficulty in eating because of the rashes inside the mouth. This is not something you need to get very worried about, but the key most important thing you need to remember is do not send your child to the school. This illness is highly infective. You send your kid to the school, everybody else in the class is very likely to pick it up. So the importance of hand foot and mortise, do not send your child to the school and do not get worried at all. It will come down to some kind of anti-histamine syrup or anti-syrup syrup should sort the rashes out and five days come, then you should generally be alright. Usually the infective plate is about a week from the day the kid started having rashes. So that week you are better off holding back your child at school. So if you remember these things, I think you should be fine. All of this are self-limiting. Only dengue is the one you need to be worried about. So remember that and then if you are trying as a background wheezing tendency, any presence of breathing difficulty, extremely disturbing cough in the night, take a help from your pediatrician. I hope this amount of information helps you for this reason.