Assignment: Management of infectious conditions

Assessment, diagnostic testing, and management of infectious conditions in a pediatric patient
Differential diagnoses for presentation of symptoms involving infectious diseases in pediatric patients
After completing your research, consider this scenario:

An eighteen-month-old child, well-known to your practice, presents with a seven-day history of fever ranging from 101 to 104.7 degrees Fahrenheit. On the fourth day of the fever, the emergency department had performed the following tests:

A blood and urine culture
A complete blood count
A comprehensive metabolic panel
The culture reports were found to be negative.

Today, the vitals of the child are the following:

Temperature: 101.5 degrees Fahrenheit
Heart rate: 120 beats/minute
Respiratory rate: 20 breaths/minute
Blood pressure: 90/40
Physical examination of the child indicates the following positive findings:

Injected conjunctiva
Palmar redness
Magenta-colored lips
Red macula
Excoriating rashes in the diaper area
On the basis of the above information, respond to the following:

What will be your differential diagnoses for this patient?
What specific physical exam findings support these differential diagnoses?
Of the differential diagnoses you listed, which would be the most concerning?
What additional diagnostic tests will you recommend? Why?
What would be your focus for caregiver education?

You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.

Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.

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The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.