Children who have coughs that go on for weeks may have a type of walking pneumonia that’s been surging in the US this year, and they may need a different antibiotic regimen to treat it, infectious disease experts say.
“It’s very much been on our radar since early summer, when we started to see a remarkable increase in the number of kids with pneumonia who seemed to have this particular type of pneumonia,” said Dr. Buddy Creech, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
Creech says that on the same day in August, four Nashville-area pediatricians reached out to him to ask why so many kids were coughing in the summertime. These doctors wanted advice, he says, because their go-to antibiotic for pneumonia – amoxicillin – didn’t seem to be working in these cases.
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