More and more children are affected by a disease similar to polio, which gradually paralyzes them. To date, there is still no treatment.
It all starts with a lowered eye and a slightly droopy face. Very quickly, the legs and arms weaken. The nervous system is damaged, breathing is difficult and eventually paralysis occurs. Here are the different stages of acute flaccid myelitis, a disease similar to polio which affects more and more children. A study conducted in the United States analyzes this unusual reappearance of the disease. The results are published in the journal mBio.
551 cases in less than five years
Acute flaccid myelitis is characterized by sudden muscle paralysis in otherwise healthy children. A few cases have appeared in adults but this remains very rare. For a long time, doctors believed that this disease was caused by poliovirus because the symptoms were similar.
However, poliomyelitis is today almost eradicated, while the rate of acute flaccid myelitis continues to increase. The disease has had a boom in 2014 in the United States, to UK and in Europe. Between August 2014 and January 2019, 551 confirmed cases of acute flaccid myelitis were identified. Even if this resurgence of the disease is worrying, it remains rare since it affects less than one to two children in a million in the United States.
Still mystery around acute flaccid myelitis
It is precisely because it is rare that this disease is difficult to understand. In the past, scientists have suspected environmental toxins and genetics to play a key role in the disease. However, doctors found that outbreaks of acute flaccid myelitis coincided with those of two enteroviruses, EV-A71 (which causes hand-foot-mouth disease) and EV-D68.
The present study asserts that there is a “strong” but “circumstantial” link. There is therefore still no precise answer today on the resurgence of acute flaccid myelitis. “The trajectory of acute flaccid myelitis over the past five years suggests that the problem is getting worse and so it is essential to galvanize our efforts to learn more about this ubiquitous, often crippling and escalating group of viruses, and to respond to them in an adequate manner”, conclude the authors of the study.
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