I was chatting with my mother about childhood illnesses, and it turns out I’ve had microplasmic pneumonia twice in my life. Thinking it’d be good to know what was (apparently) a pretty serious sickness, I checked it out on Google. I couldn’t find anything. Thus, I turn to the Straight Dope.
What did I have? How serious is it? Should I be worried about recurrence?
Never mind. I’m pretty sure my mother just misheard Mycoplasma pneumonia. I guess my immune system was just weak.
It’s sometimes called “walking pneumonia” because you can wander around sick with it for days and weeks, never really so sick that you have to take to your bed, never really well. Teenagers and young people in their twenties are known to suffer from it that way - they are less likely to know about it than older people, and more likely to go on suffering from it for weeks before they try to get treated.
When I see it under the microscope (rare, because it doesn’t kill - has to be in someone who died from something else but also had it - sometimes a baby will), instead of the alveoli filling up with neutrophils and exudate (green mucus like pus), the walls of the alveoli will be thickened with lymphocytes and the occasional neutrophil. You can’t cough up the walls of the tiny airspaces in your lung, though I know it often feels like you’re about to. That’s why the chlamydia/mycoplasma cough is nonproductive, or at least nothing but a little uncomfortable clear mucus, and doesn’t satisfy. Unless you get a regular strep pneumonia superimposed on it.
From a veterinary perspective, I want to add that pneumonia caused by a related bacterium, Mycoplasma hyopneumoniae together with secondary agents like Pasteurella or Haemophilus parasuis can be a major problem in pig herds.
Mycoplasma mycoides ssp. mycoides SC, causing contagious bovine pleuropneumonia (cited as the most important cattle disease in Africa), is a OIE List A pathogen.
Damn, botched the coding on that one. Add italics as you please.