Rubella
What is Rubella?
Rubella is a transmissible infectious disease, changes in generally benign. Its most striking and permanent effects may occur in the fetus, if the infection occurs during the first trimester of pregnancy. The adults have active immunity if they contracted the disease during childhood. This immunity lasts a lifetime.
What causes it?
The infection is transmitted by direct contact with patients, through droplets or secretions from the nasal passages and pharynx.The incubation period of the disease is 14 to 23 days and can be passed one week before the eruption period, and at least four days after it begins. Since we do not always have symptoms, it is possible that an apparently healthy person transmitting the virus.
Infants with congenital rubella eliminated large amounts of virus in pharyngeal secretions and urine and are an important source of infection to their contacts.
Rubella can occur in subclinical or asymptomatic in 25 to 50% of patients. The reservoir of this disease is the human being.
SYMPTOMS
The illness usually begins with mild fever, headache, malaise and sometimes conjunctivitis, and runny nose, that in adults. In children, symptoms usually occur a few general either do not exist.
By day 5 of initiates these symptoms appear and diffuse fine pink spots may be confused with measles or scarlet fever. They start in the face and then one day, become generalized throughout the body, staying for about three days. The most characteristic sign of the disease occurs before the eruption, such as swollen glands behind the ears and the neck area. In adult women often produces pain or swelling in joints. When presented with congenital rubella syndrome (CRS), can cause one or more abnormalities in children, such as deafness, blindness, heart defects and mental retardation, among others.