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Strep Throat Symptoms You Shouldn’t Ignore: Fast Testing & Treatment at Urgent Care
Strep throat is an infection of the throat and tonsils with group A Streptococcus bacteria. While it’s most common in children 5-15 years old, it can occur in any person at any age. The condition is spread by person-to-person contact with fluids either from the nose or from saliva, and it’s most commonly shared among families, within households, or in schools or daycare.
Dr. Arbi Ayvazian and our team at Rapid Response Urgent Care offer sick visits for patients in Granada Hills, California, who think they may have come down with strep throat. With rapid testing and fast treatment, you can avoid many of the uncomfortable symptoms of strep and the complications an untreated case can bring. Here’s what you need to know.
Strep throat symptoms
When you develop strep throat, your tonsils become inflamed, and the inflammation spreads to the surrounding area, which is what causes a sore throat (pharyngitis). The soreness starts very suddenly, and you may also quickly develop a fever, with the highest temperature registering on the second day of the infection.
You may also see white dots or streaks of pus on the throat and tonsils, as well as tiny red spots on the roof of the mouth, known as petechiae.
Other notable signs of strep throat may include:
- Chills
- Headache
- Loss of appetite
- Abdominal pain
- Nausea and vomiting
Depending on which strain of bacterium is causing the infection, you might develop a rash on your neck and chest; when this occurs, you have a condition known as scarlet fever. It may spread to other parts of your body, too.
Group A Streptococcus bacteria can also cause sores on your skin, a condition called impetigo.
It’s important to note that one symptom that doesn’t come with strep throat is a cough. If you develop a cough and other cold symptoms like a runny nose and sneezing, you likely have a viral infection, not strep, and it’s treated very differently.
Diagnosing and treating strep throat
When you come into Rapid Response Urgent Care with possible strep throat, your provider will use a rapid strep test to determine if the strep bacteria are present. They use a long cotton swab to take a sample of cells from your throat and tonsils, and then they check to see if the swab contains bacteria or not.
You get the results back in about 20 minutes. If there are strep bacteria present, you have strep throat, and we’ll prescribe a course of antibiotics — usually penicillin or amoxicillin — to treat it. You take the medication for 10 days.
If the test shows no bacteria, you may or may not have a strep throat; sometimes the rapid test gives back a false negative result. In this case, we send the sample to the laboratory to grow a culture of the cells to either verify the negative diagnosis or pick up on the bacteria that were missed in the rapid test.
If you have strep throat and are taking an antibiotic, you should start to feel better in a day or two, but you should take the entire 10-day course to ensure you eradicate all the bacteria. Most of the symptoms disappear in 7-10 days.
If you have symptoms of a strep throat, Rapid Response Urgent Care can help with a rapid test and fast treatment so you feel better soon. Walk in, call us at 818-923-5216, or book an appointment online today.