Health officials remain perplexed by mysterious cases of severe liver damage in hundreds of young children around the world. The cases of pediatric hepatitis appeared in Alabama and Europe last month. The best available evidence points to a fairly common stomach bug that isn’t known to cause liver problems in otherwise healthy kids. That virus was detected in the blood of stricken children, but not in their diseased livers.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and investigators around the globe are trying to sort out what’s going on. The illnesses are considered rare. CDC officials last week said they are now looking into 180 possible cases across the U.S. Most of the children were hospitalized, at least 15 required liver transplants and six died. More than twenty other countries have reported hundreds more cases in total, though the largest numbers have been in the U.K. and U.S. Symptoms of hepatitis, or inflammation of the liver, include fever, fatigue, loss of appetite, nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, dark urine, light-colored stools, joint pain and jaundice. The scope of the problem only started to become clear last month, though disease detectives say they have been working on the mystery for months. It’s been maddeningly difficult to nail a cause down, experts say.
Conventional causes of liver inflammation in otherwise healthy kids, the viruses known as hepatitis A, B, C, D and E, didn’t show up in tests. What’s more, the children came from different places and there seemed to be no common exposures. What did show up was adenovirus 41. Many adenoviruses are associated with common cold symptoms, such as fever, sore throat and pink eye.
