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Diphteria, symptoms and information

Diphteria a toxinfectious disease which affects primarily the higher respiratory tracts and sometimes skin.

Vaccination against the diphteria is obligatory in France since 1938. This measurement allowed eradicate the disease on the territory but the diphteria remains still present in many countries and epidemics emerge again in certain regions.

The last case declared in France goes back to 2002. The patient (27 years) was of Asian origin and hadn’t ever been vaccinated. The last but one case went back to 1989. The diphteria remains however endemic in many countries on all the continents. The ex-USSR knew a reappearance of the disease between 1990 and 1996 (with 110.000 declared cases).

The bacterium responsible for the diphteria is Corynebacterium diphtheriae or Corynebacterium ulcerans. The diphteria is a highly contagious disease which is transmitted in the air at the time of direct contacts with patients or healthy carriers (by the droplets of saliva when a patient speaks, coughs… but also indirectly by the means of contaminated objects or food).

Vaccination remains only effective protection against the diphteria.

Vaccination comprises three doses of vaccines: It is as of the two months age in France that the infants receive their first injections (vaccine combined DTC: association enters Tetanus, the Whooping-cough, the Poliomyelitis) in at least a month of interval between each dose, with a recall, carried out one year after the third dose.

A dose of recall containing anatoxine diphteric and tetanic and the poliomyelitic vaccine is recommended to 6 years, eleven years, then between sixteen and twenty years.

Symptoms and forms of the disease:

The primary symptoms are somewhat pain-killers: evils of throat, light fever, cephalgia and rigidity of the neck. But little by little the throat is blocked by a false membrane (it is then about a diphteria) which is propagated towards the luette have the pharynx. Breathing can then become difficult even impossible. The diphteria can also involve central nervous system disorders and cardiac, 2 to 6 weeks after the appearance of the primary symptoms. This disease remains mortal in 10% of the cases.

We also meets a cutaneous diphteria when the conditions of hygiene are precarious. The bacterium continuing to circulate throughout the world, vaccination against the diphteria remains the only effective means of preventing its reappearance in the Hexagon.