It’s called “walking pneumonia” and Dr. Earl Rubin said it’s becoming a problem as hospitals are dealing with it more and more.

The department director for infectious diseases at the Montreal Children’s Hospital (the Children’s) said that mycoplasma pneumoniae (walking pneumonia) is the most common cause of community-acquired pneumonia in school-age children, adolescents and adults, but that doctors are now seeing it in younger children in the kindergarten class.

“We haven’t seen that as much, and we’re also seeing more complicated diseases, because mycoplasma can affect multiple systems, and also cause more severe pneumonia, and we’ve seen that as well,” Rubin said.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control recently said that cases of mycoplasma pneumoniae have increased since the spring in children between the ages of two and four. The CDC is currently trying to raise awareness about the disease among health care providers.

Rubin said typical cases of walking pneumonia improve without treatment, but doctors are lately seeing children whose condition does not improve and continues to worsen.

“And some are admitted to the hospital with more severe pneumonia, so it becomes a diagnostic dilemma, a treatment dilemma, for a large part of the community, pediatricians and general practitioners, but also in our emergency rooms, whether or not we should think about it outside the typical age ranges, whether we should treat it. So it causes a lot of discussion,” he says.

Rubin hopes health care providers in Quebec will consider that the virus is spreading beyond the typical age range of five to 17 and take chest X-rays to find the right antibiotic for treatment.

“The other thing that’s very interesting about mycoplasma is that there is a very long incubation period, which means from the time it comes into contact with you developing symptoms it can take up to a month,” Rubin says. ‘So when people ask, have you recently been in contact with someone who is sick, people won’t remember. It could be from a month ago.”

He added that there is a high ‘attack rate’ in households and that around one in three people will contract the virus.

“Those who get it, about a quarter will develop pneumonia and require treatment,” he said. “And it has been known to cause outbreaks.”