Tuesday, September 17, 2024
Year : 2, Issue: 37
A respiratory virus that sometimes paralyzes children is spreading across the U.S., raising concerns about another possible rise in polio-like illnesses.
Wastewater samples have detected a significant escalation in an enterovirus called D68, which, in rare cases, has been linked to acute flaccid myelitis, or AFM. The illness affects the nervous system and causes severe weakness in the arms and legs. This most often occurs in young children.
“We are detecting EV-D68 nucleicSee acids in wastewater across the country now, and the levels are increasing,” said Alexandria Boehm, program director of WastewaterSCAN, a nonprofit monitoring network and a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University.
That’s the first clue to suggest that the nation might see an increase in AFM this year, said Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and author of “Crisis Averted: The Hidden Science of Fighting Outbreaks.”
Anyone who’s ever had the sniffles probably had an enterovirus; they’re that common. Most of the time, the viruses cause mild symptoms, such as a runny nose, cough, headache and generalized feelings of “meh.” The D68 enterovirus strain started causing more serious problems in 2014, when the U.S. saw, for the first time, a spike in pediatric AFM. That year, 120 kids were diagnosed. There’s no cure or specific treatment for the paralysis. Even with years of intensive physical therapy, many are left with life-altering disabilities.
A viral mystery
Though a few dozen cases have been reported every year since then, larger waves of AFM have followed an every-other-year pattern, spiking again in 2016 (with 153 cases) and in 2018 (with 238 cases). The pattern stopped in 2020 when the nation went into lockdown because of the Covid pandemic, drastically reducing viral spread. That year, just 32 cases were logged. The spread of D68 picked up again in 2022 as lockdowns were lifted. Curiously, a rise in AFM cases didn’t follow.
“We saw the virus that was previously driving the AFM cases, but we didn’t see the AFM cases associated with it,” said Dr. Kevin Messacar, an infectious disease specialist at Children’s Hospital Colorado, who treated some of the earliest AFM cases in 2014.
It’s a mystery that any virologist would appreciate. While experts try to predict how viruses will behave, the bugs are always working to stay a few steps ahead.
It could be that the virus itself has changed, or that more people in the U.S. have been exposed and now have a level of immunity to D68. “We’re still trying to figure it out,” Messacar said.
Source: NBC News
