Israeli company develops tobacco-based 3D printed lungs (Courtesy Pixabay)
This Friday in social networks the issue of alleged cases of "atypical pneumonia" that would have claimed the lives of people in the State of Mexico and Nuevo León went viral, some users even suspected that it could be unidentified cases of Covid-19, without However, the authorities denied this information, called on the population to inform themselves and not spread or believe this type of "fake news".
The Undersecretary of Health Hugo López-Gatell spoke about it at the press conference of the Government of Mexico about the coronavirus, while doctors Víctor Hugo Borja Aburto and Christian Arturo Zaragoza Jiménez also took on the task of explaining what is atypical pneumonia .
Borja Aburto explained the difference between typical and atypical pneumonia. "The typical (pneumonia) are bacterial, where we grow a culture and discover bacteria, not
While "pneumonia due to something unknown or not classified is atypical pneumonia," said the also director of Medical Benefits of the Mexican Institute of Social Security (IMSS).
In other words, atypical pneumonia is pneumonia whose etiologic agent has not been identified by laboratory tests.
How to differentiate it?
Pneumonia is inflammation or swelling of lung tissue due to infection caused by a germ, according to the Medline Plus portal of the United States National Library of Medicine.
What makes pneumonia atypical is being caused by a different pathogen than the most common ones.
According to Medline Plus, atypical pneumonia also tends to cause milder symptoms than typical pneumonia.
The main symptoms of this type of disease are: chills, cough, fever, difficulty breathing.
Other less common pneumonia symptoms are: chest pain when breathing deeply or coughing, confusion, headache, loss of appetite, muscle aches, joint stiffness, fatigue, sweating, and wet skin.
If you have these or other similar symptoms, you should consult your doctor and not self-medicate.
Although pneumonia has various symptoms similar to those infected with Covid-19, it must be identified by doctors, based on laboratory tests.
70 deaths from pneumonia in Toluca
In the last week, there have been around 70 deaths from pneumonia, in Toluca, a third of the monthly average of deaths in the capital of the State of Mexico, which is around 200, from different causes.
Faced with this situation, representatives of the Union of Funeral Homes of the Toluca Valley made a call to the health sector to indicate exactly the causes of the deaths, so that the funeral workers take the pertinent measures, both inside and outside these.
“In hospitals, there are cases that are managed like pneumonia. We know that Covid-19 occurs through pneumonia and when talking to the client, he tells us that they have already done the protocol to check if they are not infected. We have documents where that cause of death is already coming ”, explained Gabino Zarza Sánchez, representative of the Union.
So far, he added, the funeral homes of the Toluca Valley do not have official protocols or instructions to provide care in this type of case, although they are prepared and trained to offer their services when it comes to any death from an infectious contagious disease, including COVID-19.