A SUSPECTED case of the rare and highly-infectious disease scarlet fever has emerged.
Children at Linchfield Primary School in Deeping St James were given letters to take home after one case of the disease was reported.
The child contracted the infection during the Easter break and not at school.
Parents were advised to look out
for symptoms – which include a sore “strep” throat, a high temperature, rash and a thick white coating on the tongue, which peels leaving a swollen “strawberry” appearance – and to contact their GP if they were concerned.
Headteacher St John Burkett said the school had been notified by a parent who had suspected her child had the illness.
He said: “We have a chart which lists a lot of conditions and sometimes we write a letter home and other times we don’t need to. It’s a standard thing to do.”
He said it had been dealt with and there was no risk to other children.
Although scarlet fever was dreaded by many and a leading cause of death in children in the early part of the last century, since antibiotics were discovered, it is less common and milder than it once was.
It can be passed on through bacteria in airborne droplets from coughs and sneezes.
The disease takes about two to four days to develop symptoms after being infected.
Complications are rare, but they can include acute rheumatic fever and pneumonia.
A Health Protection Agency (HPA) spokesman said there were fewer than ten cases a year in Lincolnshire and fewer than 2,000 in England and Wales.
Dr Kate King, a health protection specialist with the HPA in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, said: “It is one of the diseases that should be reported by GPs and was made reportable back in the 1890s when it was an infection that was greatly feared.
“It could be spread from person to person and it was thought things such as drinking unpasteurised milk were significant. Even library books had to be destroyed.
“Something seems to have happened to either the bacterium or us because scarlet fever is now a very mild disease generally.
“It is still being reported, and it’s good to send information out so people know what to do.
“It is very rarely followed by rheumatic fever now.”
