[kirbystarcat]

Hi,
I am posting this on behalf of someone from one of my Vietnam boards. She is a physician and adopted two boys through the same agency we worked with for our DS. My son suffers from the condition she is researching and she was instrumental in helping me get a diagnosis for DS, so I owe her big time for her help Please take a minute to read and see if this may apply to your child and please consider participating if it does.

Hey all,

I am an adoptive parent of 2 awesome little boys from Vietnam, one of whom has had continual outbreaks from a disease called acropustulosis. I am also a medical doctor, doing research in dermatology, and believe that this disease entity is LARGELY under-diagnosed in internationally adopted kids. My belief is that, while considered "rare," it is actually quite prevalent in the population of internationally adopted pediatric patients.

It often occurs after a scabies infection, and usually manifests as recurrent pustular (blister) outbreaks around the hands and feet in kids under 3 who were previously infested with scabies. These blisters ITCH, crop up in groups, then resolve, and a few weeks or months later, new ones appear just like the previous batch.

I know many AP's have bounced from doctor to doctor trying to get a diagnosis and find an effective treatment for their child's pustular outbreaks. Many of your kids have been treated repeatedly and unnecessarily for scabies infections or other unrelated dermatologic diseases such as hand-foot-mouth, when what they really have could be acropustulosis. While acropustulosis has been written about in dermatology literature, there isn't much that's understood about it and no one has any idea of the incidence. My interest is in highlighting, again, the connection between scabies and acropustulosis and investigating the incidence of acropustulosis in children who had previous scabies infections. Specifically, I am interested in drawing attention to this disease in internationally adopted kids so that it is recognized by pediatricians, family docs, and dermatologists as a common complication of scabies that occurs relatively frequently in immigrant children.

To do this, I am writing a case series on adopted children with acropustulosis after scabies infection in the hope that it garners more support in the dermatology community to launch a larger prospective study in collaboration with the large International Adoption clinics in this country. If your child has had any such skin findings (recurrent, itchy, pustular outbreaks around the hands and feet after a scabies infection), please consider contacting me and/or filling out this survey that will take 10 minutes or less of your time:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=6uvfIO49RQkCdOaRzy0QhA_3d_3d

If it sounds like your child could have acropustulosis, I will follow up with you and ask that you sign a medical release form so that your child's medical information can be included in this case series. NO IDENTIFYING FEATURES WHATSOEVER will be used that could possibly link your child to any published information. If you have any concerns, questions, or comments, my email address is: laurie@goodhappenings.com

Laurie Good
http://goodhappenings.com/


By the way, here's what an acropustulosis outbreak can look like. Warning the pictures are pretty gruesome, but we deal with this at my house at least every six weeks so I am pretty desensitized at this point:
Acropustulosis of infancy. DermNet NZ

Thanks!

[melissa41]

bumping to top

[keirasmom]

Wow, this sounds exactly like what my son has. Since bringing him home he will occasionally get these tiny red pimple like bumps. Sometimes it is just one and sometimes it is a small cluster. Over the winter he had a bump on his rear end near the waist which got very infected. The pediatrician tested him for mrsa and it was neg. Then he developed a track like rash from the original bump. The ped. had us treat him for scabies, but she did not actually test for that. He did not have a recurrence of the bumps until last week. I noticed one on his ankle and one on his foot. He now has a 3rd bump on his thigh that is very sore. They seem to get very sore and then burst leaving a crater until they finally heal in a week or 2.