Antibodies to Covid in Kids, Covid and Colds, PIMS-TS,
Inside Health
BBC
4.4 • 575 Ratings
🗓️ 29 September 2020
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The story of one child's recovery from PIMS-TS, the rare new condition that caught doctors by surprise in April. James Gallagher visits specialists at the Evelina London Children's Hospital to hear how they coped with identifying and treating a condition they'd never seen before. Dr Jenni Handforth and Dr Sara Hanna explain how 'they had to reinvent and tweak the rule book' to manage PIMS-TS, where 'the immune system has gone a bit crazy' and treatments worked 'like a fire blanket to dampen down the immune system'. And scientists at the Francis Crick Institute have discovered that children can have Coronavirus-fighting antibodies from before the pandemic started. Dr George Kassiotis explains how kids could have them and what this might mean. And Dr Margaret McCartney unpicks the tricky issue of spotting Covid and cold symptoms in children.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello, you're about to listen to a BBC podcast, and I'm Ed Gamble, host of another BBC podcast, |
| 0:05.4 | The Traitors Uncloaked. But my show is available only on BBC Sounds, just like Ellis and John's |
| 0:10.6 | Saturday bonus episodes, the Pop Top Ten podcast with Scott Mills and Ryland, and comedy specials |
| 0:16.2 | from the likes of Harriet Kemsley, Susie Ruffel and Rommas Shranger Nathan. However, and maybe I'm biased, it's really all about the traitors uncloked. |
| 0:24.3 | So for a whole bunch of exclusive scoops and podcasts, listen only on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:29.4 | You're listening to Inside Health with James Gallagher, which was first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on the 29th of September 2020. |
| 0:36.7 | The world passed the landmark figure of 1 million |
| 0:39.6 | deaths with COVID as we finished putting this episode together. Fortunately, very few of them |
| 0:45.2 | have been children. Kids do seem to be relatively untouched by coronavirus. Less than one in 50 confirmed |
| 0:52.3 | cases worldwide has been in the under-19s, and those who are |
| 0:56.4 | infected tend to have much milder disease. We'll speak to the scientists that discovered children |
| 1:02.7 | had high levels of coronavirus fighting antibodies before, yes, before the pandemic started. |
| 1:10.0 | We realized that some of the samples that should have been negative because they were |
| 1:15.0 | collected before the epidemic were actually giving us signal. |
| 1:19.4 | They were coming up as positive. |
| 1:21.7 | And we were scratching our heads for a while. |
| 1:24.1 | And our resident GP, Margaret McCartney, will guide us through the tricky issue |
| 1:28.4 | of spotting COVID in children and whether a runny nose really means it's just a cold. |
| 1:34.9 | Spoiler alert, it's far more complicated than that. But first, something that caught doctors |
| 1:40.5 | by surprise in the pandemic. Some children became incredibly sick weeks after a coronavirus |
| 1:46.6 | infection. Their immune system was going into overdrive and attacking their body. It looked |
| 1:52.6 | similar to something called Kawasaki disease, but this condition was completely new to medicine. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.