By Steve Holland and Alana Wise
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said on Monday that health is an issue in the election campaign after his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, revealed she had pneumonia, and he said he would soon release detailed health information.
“I just hope she gets well and gets back on the trail, and we’ll be seeing her at the debate,” Trump said in a phone interview with Fox News.
Asked if the health of the candidates was an issue, Trump said: “I think it’s an issue. In fact … this last week I took a physical and …. when the numbers come in I’ll be releasing very, very specific numbers.”
Clinton’s bout of pneumonia, kept secret until she nearly collapsed on Sunday, has raised uncertainty about her health going into the final weeks of presidential campaigning.
The Clinton campaign finally disclosed on Sunday that the 68-year-old Democratic presidential nominee had been diagnosed with pneumonia on Friday after she complained of allergies and was seen coughing repeatedly in recent days.
The disclosure was made public hours after her campaign said she had become “overheated” to explain why, knees buckling and unsteady, she was rushed from a ceremony marking the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in New York to her daughter Chelsea’s apartment.
Trump, 70, has been suggesting for weeks that Clinton lacks the energy needed to be president.
During the Republican primary campaign, Trump dispatched rival Jeb Bush by deriding him as a “low energy” candidate. His efforts to raise questions about Clinton’s stamina mirror that strategy.
The pneumonia incident brought up some familiar concerns about Clinton’s penchant for secrecy which has fuelled a debate about her use of a private email server while she was President Barack Obama’s secretary of state from 2009 to 2013.
“You’ve got Donald Trump promoting health conspiracy theories to begin with, so any time something even lends an air of credence to that conspiracy, it needs to be debunked right away,” Democratic strategist Bud Jackson said.
Clinton’s campaign cancelled a two-day trip by the former first lady to California which was scheduled to begin Monday morning.
Democratic donor and fundraiser Bill Bartmann fielded calls from about half a dozen Democrats worried about how Clinton’s health episode would look. The callers, he said, decided to wait and see how everything plays out.
The health problem was the latest blow for Clinton at a time when Trump has erased most of her lead in national opinion polls and is competitive again in many battleground states where the Nov. 8 election is likely to be decided.
Her dismissal of half of Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables” of racist, homophobic people on Friday triggered a firestorm of criticism and prompted her to roll back the comment.
The issue also put pressure on both Clinton and Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, to reassure American voters about their health, given the rigours of the presidential campaign, in which the food is often unhealthy, sleep is elusive and the packed schedule and extensive travel is stressful.
“The short-term turbulence will be more about the handling of this than the substance, though I’m sure both candidates will be pressed for greater disclosure of health records,” said David Axelrod, a former adviser to Obama.
Trump told CNBC on Monday he would probably release information about his own health this week.
TRUMP’S HEALTH
Trump is expected to discuss his own health regimen in an interview to air on Thursday with celebrity physician Dr. Mehmet Oz.
Trump, a New York businessman, has made no secret of his affinity for fast food, sometimes sharing photos of himself on his campaign jet or at Trump Tower enjoying fried chicken, hamburgers and a taco bowl.
But he has made less information available about his health than Clinton has. Last December, he released a statement from his doctor, Harold Bornstein, that described him in excellent health with “extraordinary” strength and stamina.
The statement did not mention what medicine Trump might be taking or other details typically included in such disclosures. It was dramatically different from the hundreds of pages of medical records released by Republican nominee John McCain in 2008 to reassure Americans about his bouts of skin cancer.
“If elected, Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency,” Bornstein wrote. The Manhattan physician said in August he wrote the letter in five minutes as a Trump limo waited to pick it up.
Clinton released a two-page letter outlining her medical condition in July 2015 that sought to reassure Americans about her health after she fell and suffered a concussion at home in 2012 near the end of her tenure at the State Department.
PNEUMONIA RECOVERIES CAN VARY
Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease expert and senior associate at the UPMC Center for Health Security in Pittsburgh who is not treating Clinton, said recovery from pneumonia can vary from about a week to longer, depending on the severity.
“Some patients have very little difficulties with activities of daily living and are only mildly hampered by it while others may require hospitalization and have to reduce their activities,” he said, adding that pneumonia was the 8th leading cause of death in the United States.
Clinton’s campaign is likely to be pressed on why she did not make her pneumonia diagnosis public until late Sunday afternoon despite receiving it two days earlier.
“I think it’s exceedingly important that Hillary Clinton be transparent about what’s going on,” said presidential historian Douglas Brinkley. “If she gets a report of pneumonia on Friday, they should try to tell the public in real time. The danger for a candidate is if they seem to be hiding their health history.”
(Additional reporting by Amanda Becker in Chappaqua, New York, Luciana Lopez in New York and Emily Stephenson, Richard Cowan, David Alexander, Jeff Mason and Alistair Bell in Washington; Editing by Caren Bohan and Jeffrey Benkoe)
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