What is meningitis and how is it transmitted

Meningitis is an inflammatory disease of the soft meninges, brain or spinal cord. The most common and less severe form of the disease is viral meningitis. Bacterial inflammation is quite rare, but is very difficult, posing a serious threat to human life.

Approximately one in ten healthy people is a carrier of meningococcal disease. Microorganisms capable of long time to persist in the respiratory tract without causing clinical manifestations. Meningococci most often cause in the human body a banal cold, and only a third of patients with a rhinitis precedes the development of meningitis and meningococcemia. The risk for this disease are children under five years of age, persons aged 16 to 25 years and the elderly over 55 years.

Signs of meningitis

The main clinical signs of meningitis in children are: high-pitched crying, anxiety, tremor of the chin and hands, food refusal, drowsiness, lethargy or over-excitability, frequent regurgitation, vomiting, diarrhea, tension and bulging of the Fontanelle, and convulsions.

In adults meningitis is manifested by lethargy, drowsiness, lethargy, fever with chills, lack of appetite, painful headache, increased skin sensitivity, photophobia, hypersensitivity to sounds, nausea, vomiting, increased headache, with little change of body position, stiff neck, convulsions, disturbance of consciousness, delirium, hemorrhagic rash on the body and the characteristic posture of a patient with tightened to the stomach feet and head upturned.

Methods of transmission of meningitis

Meningitis is a disease which is extremely difficult to get directly to person from person. The source of infection - human or animal, who are carriers of the virus that can cause inflammation of the meninges. By direct contact of Contracting meningitis is possible only in case if it is caused by the meningococcus.

The causative agent of meningitis depends on how it is contagious. Primary meningitis is contagious to all. The pathogen is transmitted in different ways.

Transmission of purulent meningitis caused by meningococcus - airborne: human infection occurs through the infected saliva of objects, sneezing, coughing, kissing. Serous meningitis is typically called enteroviruses, which are transmitted by airborne droplets by sneezing and coughing fecal or through dirty hands or objects the patient. Serous meningitis can be transmitted by bathing in the pool, pond, lake. In the children's groups, the possible outbreak of enteroviral meningitis that rarely is reaching epidemic proportions.

Secondary meningitis is a complication of various inflammatory processes: otitis, rhinitis, sinusitis. Rhinogenous, otogenny, odontogenic meningitis is generally not contagious.