There is currently excitement on social media about a supposedly new infectious disease, triggered by a virus: In India, around 82 children have contracted what is known as tomato fever in the past few months.

What is it?

Johanna Kuroczik

Editor in the "Science" department of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.

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On August 17, scientists led by Vivek Chavda from the pharmacology department of the LM College of Pharmacy in Ahmedabad published a report on the "outbreak of tomato flu in India" in the journal "The Lancet Respiratory Medicine".

Accordingly, the first cases occurred in early May in southern India, in the state of Kerala.

By the end of June, children in the Tamilnadu and northern Odisha regions were also affected.

All were under nine years old and recovered without causal treatment, long-lasting damage was not observed.

The symptoms of the disease called "tomato fever" or "tomato flu" were similar to those of other viral infectious diseases such as dengue or chikungunya fever.

The children suffered from severe joint pain, high fever, fatigue, diarrhea and nausea.

There have also been skin rashes, which is where the name of the disease comes from – the reddish blisters can theoretically reach the size of a tomato, but the rashes are smaller on the photos published so far.

Is “tomato fever” an independent disease?

However, "tomato fever" is not yet a clear medical diagnosis, since the disease has not been researched and the pathogen is not known, but a so-called exclusion diagnosis.

Symptoms are typical of viral diseases;

if they occur in children, they are tested for various viral infectious diseases.

In the current cases, dengue, chikungunya, the Zika virus, varicella, herpes viruses and SARS-CoV-2 have been excluded.

Therefore, the symptoms suggested tomato fever, the researchers write.

The phenomenon is not entirely new; an Indian medium reported on a case back in 2007.

Here the symptoms were evaluated as an after-effect of an infection with Chikungunya.

This would not be unusual

"This seems medically plausible," says Tim Niehues.

He is a member of the board of the German Society for Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine and Director of the Center for Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine at the Helios Clinic in Krefeld.

There's not much that can be said about tomato fever, he says, but in Germany parents don't have to worry.

Dengue or chikungunya fever is transmitted by vectors - such as mosquitoes - and has so far been rather rare in this country.

Of course, one has to observe the situation in India.

“The 82 cases were described from May to July.

If there were an exponential spread, one would expect hundreds or thousands of cases right now.”

In addition, on August 19, "The Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal" published a case report by British doctors in connection with the current outbreak: A 13-month-old girl and her brother, who was five years older, were returned to Kerala after a holiday in India England treated in the emergency department.

In India, according to the parents, they had played with a child who had previously suffered from "tomato fever".

Both had skin rashes, the girl also had painful lesions in her mouth.

However, they did not have a fever.

Her symptoms corresponded to the contagious but mild hand-foot-and-mouth disease and a Coxsackie virus of type A16 was detected as the pathogen, which is a frequent trigger of hand-foot-and-mouth disease.

Whether the children in India also suffered from hand, foot and mouth disease,