Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health question at jh.edu.

That's public health question at jh.edu for future podcast episodes.

This is Lindsay Smith Rogers, and today we're looking into what's behind the uptick in walking pneumonia in some parts of the U.S., particularly among children.

I talk with Dr. Anna Sixthamials, an associate professor of pediatric infectious diseases at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

and a pediatric infectious disease epidemiologist for the Johns Hopkins Hospital.

She breaks down what walking pneumonia actually is, how it's tested and treated,

and why we're seeing an influx of cases after a few years of lulls.

Let's listen.

Dr. Anisixamials, thank you so much for joining us on public health on call.

Today we're going to talk about walking pneumonia, but first, let me start off by asking you a

little bit about your work.

Thank you so much for hosting this session, and I'm really happy to join you to talk about

walking pneumonia today. So in my job, I'm a pediatric infectious disease doctor, and I also think about not only

infections that infect kids right now, but also how we can prevent infections in children. So I'm

really interested in not only how we treat and manage those infections, but how we can prevent

kids from getting sick and

keeping them healthy. So walking pneumonia is in the headlines, particularly in children.

Are there more cases now or what's happening? This is definitely something that we're seeing right now

that we haven't seen in a few years.

Walking pneumonia is caused by a bacteria called mycoplasma pneumonia.

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