Symptoms of Meningitis in a Newborn Baby

Video Transcript

"Symptoms of meningitis in a newborn baby. First of all there are two causes. There's a bacterial which is life threatening. The viral is rarely life threatening. It presents with fever, loss of appetite, vomiting, irritability, the child's extremely irritable, pale skin, the child could become unresponsive and feel drowsy. Also there is a high pitched cry in a baby with meningitis. It is very high pitched. When I say high pitched I mean it's a blood curdling cry that will cause you to want to seek help for the child if nothing else does because the cry is just, it's unbelievable. So when a child presents with a fever, especially a high fever, it's time to do something about that child because a fever alone can cause brain damage. Because the more fever a child has the higher the oxygen content is eaten up and so you don't want to end up with a child that has had a high fever when it goes untreated, because of the problems it could complicate later on in life also."