United States: A respiratory virus that sometimes leads to paralysis of children under the age of five is increasingly spawning in the US, which is another polio-like disease.
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An enterovirus known as D68 has been detected in more wastewater samples than previously collected ones, and in some cases, this virus could be associated with acute flaccid myelitis or AFM.
It is an illness that affects the nervous system and weakens the affected person’s arms and legs to the extreme. These manifestations are most commonly detected in children of preschool age or small school children.
According to Alexandria Boehm, program director of WastewaterSCAN, a nonprofit monitoring network and a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, “We are detecting EV-D68 nucleic acids in wastewater across the country now, and the levels are increasing,” Yahoo Life reported.
Moreover, per the first clue, which suggested that the country would also experience a rise in AFM this year, as said Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and author of “Crisis Averted: The Hidden Science of Fighting Outbreaks.”
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As experts note, enteroviruses are about as common as the cold. Nine out of ten times, these viruses result in minor symptoms, including a runny nose and cough, headache, and general malaise commonly associated with the layman’s term “feeling ‘meh.'”
The D68 enterovirus strain only began to present more severe complications of the disease in 2014, when the US reported the first instance of an epidemic increase in pediatric AFM. One hundred twenty children received that diagnosis in that year.
At present, there is no cure, or specific treatment that could be administered to prevent the paralysis. As with most spinal cord injuries, even after years of rigorous physical therapy, the victims are often left with huge disabilities.
Experts call it a “viral mystery”
While only a few dozen cases have been reported annually since then, larger waves of such AFM have occurred in an every-other-year pattern, which spiked again in 2016 with 153 cases and in 2018 with 238 cases.
The pattern ceased in 2020 due to the Covid pandemic and the ensuing locking down process of the entire nation, thereby slowing down the viral transmissions significantly.
In that year, only 32 cases were recorded. While the virus could still be transmitted from person to person, the increase of restrictions being lifted in 2022 saw the rise of the cases again. Interestingly enough, a rise in AFM cases didn’t follow.
According to Dr. Kevin Messacar, an infectious disease specialist at Children’s Hospital Colorado, who treated some of the earliest AFM cases in 2014, “We saw the virus that was previously driving the AFM cases, but we didn’t see the AFM cases associated with it,” Yahoo Life reported.