What Causes Mystery Liver Illnesses in Children?
2022-05-31
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1Health officials are still looking for answers related to mysterious cases of severe liver damage in hundreds of young children around the world.
2The best available evidence points to a common stomach virus not known to cause liver problems in otherwise healthy children.
3That virus was found in the blood of sick children, but it has not been found in their diseased livers.
4Eric Kremer is a virus researcher at the Institute of Molecular Genetics of Montpellier in France.
5He said, "There's a lot of things that don't make sense."
6The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and health officials around the world are trying to find out what is going on.
7The illnesses are considered rare.
8CDC officials recently said they are now looking into 180 possible cases across the United States.
9Most of the children were hospitalized.
10At least 15 required new livers and six died.
11More than 20 other countries have reported hundreds more cases in total.
12The largest numbers have been in Britain and the U.S.
13Some signs of liver inflammation include fever, tiredness, loss of interest in eating and nausea.
14Others include stomach pain, joint pain and jaundice - a condition that causes a person's skin to turn yellow.
15Disease experts say they have been working on the mystery illness for months but have struggled to find an exact cause.
16The usual causes of liver inflammation in otherwise healthy children come from viruses known as hepatitis A, B, C, D and E.
17But none of those viruses appeared in tests.
18The children came from different places and there seemed to be no common means of virus contact.
19What did show up in tests was a virus known as adenovirus 41.
20More than half of the U.S. cases have tested positive for adenovirus.
21In a small number of tests to see what kind of adenovirus was present, adenovirus 41 appeared every time.
22Dr. Jay Butler is the deputy director for infectious diseases at the CDC.
23He told the Associated Press that the fact that adenovirus keeps appearing strengthens the possibility that it plays a part in the illness.
24But it is still unclear how.
25Many adenoviruses are related to signs of the common cold, such as fever, sore throat and pink eye.
26Some versions - including adenovirus 41 - can cause other problems, such as inflammation in the stomach and intestines.
27Adenoviruses have been linked in the past to hepatitis in children, but mostly in children with weakened immune systems.
28Dr. Umesh Parashar is head of the CDC group that studies gut diseases caused by viruses.
29He said recent genetic studies do not suggest that a single new version of adenovirus is to blame.
30I'm Jonathan Evans.