HOME HEALTH GUIDE

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 8, Issue 46, 6 February 1945, Page 3

HOME HEALTH GUIDE

ECZEMA IN INFANCY If your baby has, a rash —commonly known, as eczema —which will not clcar away or } which keeps coming back again don't go on trying this or that ointment for months on end. Have him tested for allergy—that is f sensitivity ! Maybe, the underlying cause of your baby's eczema is something to which he re-acts such as house dust ; pollens in the air or foodstuffs. Hay fever, asthma urticaria bouts of diarrhoea or vomit- > > ing are caused in the same way. Often eczema in a baby is followed later by asthma or hay fever in the older child. So if an eczema in a baby fails to clear up quickly 5 have him tested. The testing is simple. Babies under two years of age are given a little scratch on the into which extracts of any suspected cause are rubbed. Reactions quickly come as red wheals if the child is sensitive to the material. In tests made recently in a children's hospi- | tal lots of common things were implicated. Horse_ dander ? house dust } mixed feathers, animal hairs such as cat or dog—these dusts commonly caused eczema. Sometimes it was a pollen borne in the ai<r., Other times foodstuffs—egg white, wheat o cow's milk, oatmeal and iso on. If a food is responsible cut it out. If you can't eliminate it. substitute something else.—for example cow's milk can be avoided—use a mattress and pillow of sheep's wool instead of kapok. The risk from house dust may be removed by vacuum cleaning and by sleeping the child outside ; animal dust by eliminating the animal. If the casual thing can't be avoided injection of extracts will desensitise the child. Remember these causes of eczemas, and have them investigated.