Data compared children attending the emergency department at the Queen's Medical Centre in Nottingham between February 2007 and 2008, with similar data from 10 years earlier.
Breathing difficulty remained the most common problem in 2007/08, accounting for 20.1 per cent of cases, compared with 31 per cent in 1997. But, in the 2007/08 cohort, 6.7 per cent of children went to the emergency department with a cough, ranking as the fifth most common problem - a symptom that did not appear in the list of most common ailments in the 1997 analysis.
Diarrhoea was the third most prevalent problem, affecting 1,731 children, compared with 617 in 1997. Children arriving with a rash soared from 190 in 1997, when it was the sixth most common problem, to 1,066 in 2007, ranking fourth.
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