Many children today are suffering from asthmatic bronchitis, an infection of the respiratory system caused by the syncyitiale virus. The virus causes the child to cough and sneeze, which makes the respiratory airways produce a liquid secretion that leads to a runny nose and wheezing in a child’s chest within the bronchi or bronchioles.

Dr. Barbara Joy Mukamabano, a specialist paediatric at Polyclinique La Médicale (Kanimba Hospital), says asthmatic bronchitis is curable, but within the first four to five years of infection, if the parents follow medical prescription strictly.

She, however, adds that asthmatic bronchitis does not only attack children.

‘‘Even adults sometimes contract this illness. Also remember that asthmatic bronchitis is not asthma, but a Bronchitis or Bronchiolitis in a form of asthma,” says Dr Mukamabano.

Why asthmatic bronchitis?

Many infants suffer from bronchitis or bronchiolitis because they are unable to cough and spit out the cough. The secretion from the bronchiole trickles down to the lungs and causes difficulty in breathing. That is why asthmatic bronchitis is a form of asthma.

The disease is characterised by chronic coughing, wheezing, vomiting and asthmatic tendencies.

Causes

There are two main causes of asthmatic bronchitis. One cause may be family dispositions, while the second is personal body allergies (on food, drinks, on cloths that we do not know where they come from, on fruits and perfumes, dust and heavy flying winds, etc.), says Dr. Mukamabano.

She says sometimes it may be infectious bronchitis caused by infection that makes a patient start coughing incessantly. In children, spitting out the phlegm is difficult, which makes the lung wet and causes the child to wheeze when breathing.

This illness is caused most of the time by body allergies when the weather is very cold.

It can also be a result of hereditary transmission for family lines that have or used to have certain allergies like pimples, sinusitis and asthma. In this case, if someone in the family has these allergies, children from the same family are likely candidates of bronchitis.

Remedy

Dr. Mukamabano says sunny weather is good for people with cough, and patients should be in a place that has enough fresh air to ease respiration.

"It is not good to fully close the room in which your child sleeps. Also, do not do quick movements of bed sheets and dust holding materials near the child’s bed. It is also advisable to protect the child from heavy flying wind,” she counsels.

Dr. Ladislas Hategeka, a specialist paediatric at RSSB at ‘Clinique de Pédiatrie,’ advises parents to take children to hospital any time they have a cough and difficulty in breathing.

With regard to climate and weather change, Dr Hategeka says, it is not the climate that adapts to the person, but rather the other way round. He advises parents to avoid exposing their children to wind, dust, chemical products and air conditioner, among others.

Is asthmatic bronchitis curable?

"Asthmatic bronchitis is not necessarily a chronic disease, thus, it is curable. It may sometimes appear chronic, but it is predicted to be treatable and curable. However, if it was caused by family predisposition allergies, it is temporally curable because one does not know where it is rooted and it can reoccur,’’ Dr. Mukamabano explains.

General symptoms

Some of its symptoms include coughing and sneezing with a wheezing sound in the chest and vomiting the phlem.

"An infected child coughs, and he/she may get fever or spasmodic coughs that make him/her throw up,” says Dr. Mukamabano.

Treatment

Dr. Mukamabano says the best way to treat asthmatic bronchitis is to first of all to test and distinguish it from normal cough and know what causes it.

"We have to know the child’s living conditions and allergies before treating them. They may not be curable for asthmatic hereditary families or when the illness is not treated well and develops into asthma. However, if well-treated in the family carrier, children also get cured. Treatment in children is recommended between one to four years,” Dr. Mukamabano explains.

"It is easy to treat this illness if it is at the bronchi level because we take the child for physiotherapy service to help him/her coughing and spitting out. This is done after the facilitating medicines that push the cough and make it easy to go out. For children over five years, we show them how to cough and spit out the cough and take medicine to eliminate bronchitis,” Dr.Mukamabano adds.

Physiotherapy means the treatment of disease, injury, or deformity by physical methods such as massage, heat treatment and exercise rather than by drugs or surgery.

"Most of the time, children’s bronchitis does not require antibiotics because it is not infection, but rather an allergic-originated inflammation. It is crucial to discuss with your doctor the reason of a medicine choice after the tests,” advises Dr. Mukamabano.

However, not all clinics have the capacity to test the causes of Bronchitis in order to know if it is caused by personal body allergies or familial predisposition.

Asthmatic bronchitis prevalence

Dr Mukamabano says 70% of the children she treats in a month and who are under five have asthmatic bronchitis.

Dr. Hategeka, on the other hand, notes that over 60% of children below five with respiratory illnesses he treats per day have bronchitis. The severity of this disease increases between January and May when the weather is very cold.

Dr. Prof. Stephenson Musiime, the medical in charge of Child and Women’s Health Service in King Faisal Hospital, says bronchitis is on the rise especially during the rainy seasons. Statistics indicate that between 10 and 20 children are treated for the disease per day.

Patients’ testimonies

‘Asthmatic bronchitis is cured once the patient is well-treated. My five-year-old daughter had it and she got cured. It took her five years to get cured because I discovered that she had developed that problem when she was three months old. My advice to parents is to keep the patient covered especially during the rainy season,” says Chantal Batamuriza, 51.

Bernadette Kanakuze’s daughter also recovered from asthmatic bronchitis after several years.

"My daughter, aged 33 years now, had asthmatic bronchitis when she was nine months old. I followed the medical prescription and kept her from extreme weather conditions. She has now recovered fully,” she says.

As Dr. Prof. Musiime says, internationally, 334 million people in the world in 2014 had asthmatic bronchitis.

One doctor in Texas pointed out to an NBC reporter that every year, respiratory syncytial virus or RSV sends 75,000 to 125,000 children to the hospital and kills as many as 200 every year, numbers that are a little fuzzy because hospitals are not required to report deaths from RSV.

The American Lung Association reports that the disease develops about in nine million people in the US every year. Bronchitis affects people of all ages; more than 10 million people have bouts of acute bronchitis every year and most of the infected children are below five years of age.

According to the Hospital Management Information System (HMIS) team of the Ministry of Health, 6,8% children aged below five years had acute respiratory diseases in 2012, where respiratory diseases were among the top ten causes of morbidity in hospitals in Rwanda.