We report a case of spontaneous pneumomediastinum (SPM) in a 3 year-old child, admitted to the emergency department because he presented dyspnea for a few hours, after a paroxysm of cough. The SPM is rare in children; the term "spontaneous" is reserved for cases of pneumomediastinum that haven't a traumatic cause. SPM is seen most commonly in asthmatics and in any patient who induces a Valsalva maneuver. The clinical diagnosis is confirmed by chest radiograph. When the diagnosis is uncertain, the chest CT scan is considered the gold standard of imaging tests, capable of detecting pneumomediastinum even in patients with small amounts of mediastinal air. In this case CT images showed the cause: spontaneous bronchial rupture. The direct sign of bronchial injury is the contiguity of the luminal air with that in the mediastinum. In the literature SPM cases are very rare, at least in health patients without tracheobronchial anomalies. The SPM is generally a benign entity that requires supportive care, and resolution occurs spontaneously, such as in our patient. In this article we want to explain the main clinical, diagnostic and therapeutic aspects of SPM, because, even if it's rare in children, it must be considered in the differential diagnosis of dyspnea; then we want to demonstrate as, in this case, a TC scan was important to identifying the SPM cause: a bronchial rupture.

Scabies is an itchy-parasitic cutaneous infection; it can spread from person to person directly or through clothing, sheets or mattresses. The incidence had fallen a lot during the last ten years, but recently it is growing up again; this is due to immigration of people coming from countries where local hygienic and social conditions are very poor. In this contest it is more frequent to observe the infection in pediatric age, sometimes also newborn. In this particular case the diagnosis can be more difficult because the clinical manifestations are different from pathognomonic lesions we usually see in adult age. We report the clinical case of a newborn, 30-day-old, born in Italy from an Indian family. When the baby was admitted in our department she looked in good physical conditions but she presented a pustular dermatitis all over the body, scalp excluded. The presence in the mother of typical skin lesion and baby's eosinophilia at blood test, induced us to suspect the diagnosis of scabies. However, both the search for acarus at optical microscope on a skin sample obtained with scarification and clinical response to a treatment with PAF, were unsuccessful. Moreover, we found in the baby a persistent trombopenia; this fact induced us to think of other hypothesis. Finally the child's positive response to permethrina topical treatment and normalization of the number of platelets let us confirm the initial diagnosis of scabies.