A child gets vaccination (Photo: VNA)HCM City (VNA) - Doctors from HCMCity’s Hospital for Tropical Diseases advised people to vaccinate againsttetanus as the hospital admitted 134 patients with the disease in the firstfour months of this year, accounting for nearly 50 percent of last year’stotal.
Nguyen Van Ban, 60, from the south centralcoastal province of Binh Thuan, was hospitalised at the HCM City Hospital forTropical Diseases due to tetanus.
Ban’s thumb was hit by a hammer while working asa bricklayer. He felt pain and went to a drug store near his house to buymedicine to reduce it.
Several days later, he had symptoms such as jawcramping and trouble swallowing.
His family thought he got stroke and brought himto a practitioner of traditional medicine for acupuncture.
However, his health became worse and worse. Hewas hospitalised and then diagnosed with tetanus.
Dr Nguyen Thanh Phong of the hospital’sinfectious diseases department, said that all the patients with tetanus did notvaccinate against the disease during their childhoods.
Most of them are at working age, which is thehigh risk time to get tetanus because it is easy to get spores of tetanus inthe body through broken skin or injuries caused by an object puncturing skinsuch as a nail or needles, Phong said.
The hospital’s recent study showed that around20 percent to 25 percent of the hospital’s total patients contracted thedisease without an identifiable injury, he said.
Phong said that tetanus can threaten life,especially patients with other diseases, such as myocardial ischemia whichoccurs when blood flow to heart is reduced, preventing it from receiving enoughoxygen.
Last year, tetanus killed seven patients at thehospital. -VNA
VNA
