Written by admin on 2009-03-11T13:01:13+0000">March 11, 2009 – 1:01 pm
Treatment of contacts
In bacterial meningitis, it is usual to give special antibiotics such as Rifampicin to those people who are close contacts of the patient; in practice, this usually means just those who are living in the same house. These antibiotics hopefully will kill off any of the organisms in these exposed people. It is not usually thought necessary to treat the more occasional contacts, as meningitis is not that infectious, and in practice only close contacts are likely to be vulnerable.
The only self-help of relevance is to be on the look-out for a stiff neck (on bending forward) whenever you get a fever or a headache. This applies especially if you live in a community which seems to have a large number of meningitis cases. Watch for that stiff neck, without getting paranoid about it. Always check for a stiff neck whenever you or someone in your family gets a headache or a temperature then if it is meningitis you’ll spot it early.
Testing a young child for a stiff neck isn’t easy; they don’t like having their neck forcibly bent. Instead, make a game of it. Ask the child if she can touch her knee with her nose, if she can, she’s very unlikely to have a stiff neck. And don’t forget that children under eighteen months don’t always get a stiff neck. Instead, where it’s still present, the fontanelle bulges.
*29\20\2*
