Recently, second grade teacher Pat Henry was faced with a spate of absences in her rural Pennsylvania classroom. No, it wasn't a highly infectious bug like chicken pox or the flu; it was something much simpler and just as potentially debilitating – poison ivy.

"Two of the children had it on their faces so badly that their eyes were swollen shut, and they had to be put on steroids," says Henry. "They both missed school for an entire week."

In the case of Henry's students, several of the pupils were neighbors and played together in the same stand of woods where they probably were exposed to the plant. A different child's doctor theorized that he got it from his cat, but there were at least two others who had never had poison ivy before, and how they got it remains a mystery to their parents and doctors alike.

That doesn't surprise Dr. Anthony J. Mancini. Dr. Mancini is a pediatric dermatologist at Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago, and the rashes from poison ivy, poison sumac and poison oak are all too familiar to him. He notes, in fact, that he doesn't really lump all three plants into one category called "poison ivy" as many do, but admits that the net result is the same – intense itching, redness, blisters, swelling and misery.

In the case of the mystery exposures, Dr. Mancini says that one of the notable features of reactions to the poison plants is that an initial reaction can come up to 20 days after exposure. This can be particularly puzzling for a patient who has never had a poison plant reaction in the past.

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