What are the signs and symptoms of acute rheumatic fever?
Rheumatic fever is a multi-system disease, affecting primarily, the joints, the heart, the brain and the skin and the tissue beneath the skin. Fever with joint pains usually following a history of sore throat three weeks earlier alerts the paediatrician to the possibility of rheumatic fever in the patient. Large joints, most commonly, the knees, ankles, wrists and elbows are affected. Small joints like the finger joints or rib cage joints are never involved. The joints are swollen, warm, painful even at rest, and this pain gets worse with movement of the joints. What is most characteristic is that all joints are not affected at the same time and the arthritis is called migratory. First, one of the joints is affected and then the swelling and pain moves to another joint, while the joint affected earlier gets better and so on. The fever is seen only during the early course of the disease. The arthritis lasts for two to three weeks. As regards the heart, acute rheumatic fever tends to aff
