By Niamh Harris – The People’s Voice
News recently broke about China’s outbreak of a ‘mysteryious’ pneuemonia that appears to be affecting mainly children.
Experts say they now fear that the infection is spreading around the globe.
While the mystery outbreak began in May, the world only learned about it last week, prompting the World Health Organization (WHO) to send official requests to China for more data.
The Mail Online reports: Pneumonia itself is not a virus. It is used to describe any infection that inflames the lungs, whether that be a virus like Covid or a bacteria such as strep.
Data shared by China with the WHO and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows the surge in pneumonia is not being caused by a novel pathogen, like the Covid pandemic was.
Rather, several seasonal illnesses – including flu, RSV and the lesser-known mycoplasma – are behind the rise.
Mycoplasma pneumonia is a bacterial infection that infects at least 2 million Americans each year – but it rarely makes headlines because cases are mild and deaths extremely rare.
The difference this year is that children’s immunity, globally, is low following lockdowns, school closures and mask mandates.
Those who locked down harder and longer, like China, are seeing bigger outbreaks, but even Sweden, which notoriously did not shut down its society, has recorded a rise in child pneumonia cases.
Similar outbreaks of the strain of pneumonia — dubbed ‘white lung syndrome’ because of the distinctive white patches on chest x-rays of affected children — have been reported in Denmark, the Netherlands, and at least two states in the US – Ohio and Massachusetts.
Health authorities across the globe are assuring the public the world is not on the precipice of another pandemic.
But it’s what they are not telling us that is more revealing….