When we first met Henry we noticed a small area on his check (the size of a finger print) that was much lighter than the rest of his skin. We were told that he had a skin fungus. When we took Henry to the pediatrician in the U.S. she said it was dry skin not a fungus. We have been moisturizing Henry's checks day and night for weeks but the finger print has spread to both cheeks, from his eye to his jaw line.
Yesterday I took Henry to the dermatologist. The dermatologist said it's not a fungus or dry skin. She thinks Henry has a food sensitivity which is causing inflammation. The inflammation is causing the skin the lighten up. She gave us a prescription cream to see if it will help.
We have introduced a large number of new foods to Henry so I have no idea what food could be causing this. It has to be a food that the Transitional home was feeding him as well since it started in Ethiopia.
If your Ethiopian child has a food sensitivity, I would love to know what it is! We suspect milk might be the cause since we have increased Henry's dairy intake but that's just a gut reaction, it could be anything.
3 comments:
We have friends whos daughter is allergic to the protein in milk - the whey and the casein - but not the lactose.
Milk was my very first thought! Some kiddos have an eczema sort of reaction to milk. I had to cut out milk for the whole first year of Eben's life because he would have a reaction if I drank milk (I was nursing him). Fortunately, he did outgrow this by the time he was about a year old when it was time to introduce milk into his diet. I'd take milk out and give it a try.
You might want to look up gluten, too, if removing milk doesn't make a difference. I'm not sure if Henry's reaction is consistent with a gluten allergy. However, I have friends with celiac's and they have all kinds of crazy tummy issues & skin stuff if they consume gluten.
Erica
The TH told us that Wesley had a skin fungus on his face also and our pediatrician also said it was just dry skin. She said that the cream the TH was using had a steroid in it and that was what was lightening his skin. She recommended we use Eucerin lotion and it really helped with the dryness and his skin is no longer lighter in color.
I thought I'd share that since it sounded sort of similar to what happened with us, but in our case it never spread to other areas or got any worse, so maybe it's a totally different thing...? Hope you're able to figure it out real soon. :)
Tisha
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