Health authorities around the world are investigating a mysterious increase in severe hepatitis cases among young children, which has led to the death of 11 children around the world, according to a statistic for the Washington Post.
Investigators and researchers from global health agencies, the United States, the United Kingdom, Israel, Italy and Japan are sharing opinions to share data and hypotheses about the disease.
Hepatitis C is a rare disease in healthy children. More than 20 children required liver transplants due to the recent infections.
The Washington Post reports the beginning of cases in a Birmingham hospital in Alabama, where a young child has been vomiting for days, with yellow eyes and severe hepatitis.
His pediatric gastroenterologist, Helena Gutierrez, had him run blood tests that immediately ruled out all common causes of viral hepatitis, noting how rare acute hepatitis of unknown cause is diagnosed in a healthy child.
Within a week, another child with the same symptoms showed up at the Children’s Center of Alabama. Then a third. “We start thinking, maybe just three cases and it’s over,” Gutierrez says.
But cases continued to emerge. Over the next four months, doctors were following nine children, all under the age of 6, with acute hepatitis of unknown cause. Two children have been taken to an out-of-state hospital for liver transplants.
The phenomenon of these unknown hepatitis infections was not limited to the United States, as dozens of cases were recorded throughout Europe, which raised fears that it could turn into a new epidemic.
And the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said, on Wednesday, that what Alabama doctors believed to be a local outbreak last October developed into a mysterious global disease that affected at least 520 children in 20 countries, including 180 in the United States.
Eleven children have died around the world, including five in the United States. And more than twenty needed liver transplants.
“It’s very unusual because these are healthy children,” says Elizabeth Whitaker, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Imperial College London, whose country has reported 176 cases.
She explained that mild hepatitis is fairly common in children, but doctors see something different and worrisome: a severe infection of the children’s liver that requires transplants.
She said the UK usually performs 8 to 10 such transplants a year. This year, she has performed 11 operations in three months.
The growing cases have prompted an international search to determine the cause.
And last April, the US health authorities, based on analyzes of acute hepatitis infections in very young children in the United States, suggested that an adenovirus was behind these mysterious cases, but they did not confirm that it was the confirmed cause.
Adenoviruses, which are common, usually cause respiratory symptoms, conjunctivitis, or even digestive disorders.
It was originally known that adenoviruses were one of the causes of hepatitis, but it was believed that they only lead to infection in children with weak immune systems.