Hope shines for 11-month-old baby with rare type of asthma

Rajkot: “How is this child even breathing?” — was how doctors reacted upon seeing the results of the CT scan they did on an eleven-month-old child in Jamnagar who is suffering from a rare allergic asthma, bronchopulmonary aspergillosis (ABPA), since he was three-months-old.
Thankfully, doctors now say that the child, Raghav Chandra, is responding to medicines and is getting cured of the malaise that left him practically sleepless and cranky for the past six months.
According to doctors it’s a kind of allergic disease very rarely seen in children that causes fungus growth in the lungs mainly due to the presence of humidity inside the house. While it’s a hereditary diseases, it is absolutely rare that a child of his age was suffering from it.
Ever since Raghav was three-months-old, he started having cough, a malaise so intense that he could not sleep, nor his mother could feed him and even at times made him vomit.
His parents had recorded a video of the child coughing non-stop for doctors to know the exact condition.
His father Pintu Chandra who works as an RTO agent took him to Ahmedabad, but doctors could not diagnose his problem. He was then taken to Dr Kamlesh Shah, a pediatrician in Jamnagar, who understood the gravity of the case and referred him to G G hospital’s pulmonary medicine department.
Head of pulmonary medicine department, Dr Firoz Ghanchi told TOI: “We performed a CT scan and the results left us breathless! Tubes of both sides of his lung were blocked and it was a case of severe asthma.”
The physician said that while asthma is a hereditary disease, but it set in too early in the child.
It’s a very rare disease in children of less then 10 years and this child was then not even six-months-old, Dr Ghanchi added.
According to doctors it’s a fungal growth seen in only one percent of asthmatic patients, but very uncommon in children. The doctors started treatment of ABPA and within two weeks they started getting result.
“Because of fungus allergy there was swelling in his trachea which was akin to pneumonia. It happens because of genetically allergic tendency and humidity in the house or bird-shit can trigger it,” said Dr Shah.
Raghav’s mother Vaishali said that they even feared that the child may be suffering from TB, but a report of an Ahmedabad lab ruled it out. “Now, we have come to understand that it’s because of allergy, which the doctors claim will not be able to say exactly what till he is five years of age,” she added.