Scientists at the University of California, San Francisco are trying to explain why a lot of kids without prior health problems suddenly got a bad type of liver infection (called acute severe hepatitis) in the Spring of 2022. This was after restrictions caused by COVID-19 ended up being eased across 35 different countries, including America.
Pediatric hepatitis is something that doesn’t happen very often, but doctors got worried recently when they began to see a lot of it all of a sudden. Up to now, about 1,000 kids have had this problem and 50 of them needed new livers put in their bodies. Sadly, 22 children with this issue have passed away.
Recently, researchers published findings that suggest one cause of hepatitis is linked to different infections caused by viruses like the ones that make you have colds and flu. These kinds of viruses need something called an “AAV2″ in order to replicate, or spread, inside your liver.
When kids went back to school, it made them more likely to catch infections with regular germs. This study means that a small group of these children could have become more at risk for bad hepatitis if they got multiple infections at once.
In the study, researchers were really surprised that the illnesses in children weren’t coming from new viruses, but from everyday childhood infections. Charles Chiu is a doctor and professor working at two different universities who helped with this study and wrote about its results.
Researchers think that the outbreak of a virus could be linked to the strange situations caused by the Coronavirus pandemic, like school and daycare closures and social rules needing to be followed. All of this might be an unintentional result of living with these restrictions for the last two or three years.
By August 2022, reports of illnesses came from 35 different countries, including the U.S., where there were 358 separate cases being looked at. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention got involved to figure out what was causing these illnesses.
Examining AAV2 and Other Viruses in American Children With Severe Hepatitis
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) wanted to do a study, so researchers did something called PCR tests on samples from 16 kids in six states – Alabama, California, Florida, Illinois, North Carolina, and South Dakota – from October 2021 to May 2022. They compared the samples with 113 control samples too.
When looking at the 14 blood samples, we saw that 93% had AAV2 (adeno-associated virus 2) and all of them had a virus called HAdV (human adenoviruses). There was also an extra type of HAdV called HAdV-41 found in 11 samples. And finally, 85.7% of the cases had a combination of 3 other viruses called Epstein-Barr, herpes, and enterovirus.
Chiu found that the results were similar to two studies done in the UK, where they discovered the same virus. In all three of these studies, it showed that multiple viruses appear together in the children tested. Additionally, 75% of the kids in the American study had 3 or 4 different viruses.
Adeno-associated viruses (AAVs) are not known to cause sickness on their own. However, it’s possible that they could make children more likely to get very bad cases of hepatitis if the virus combines with other infections. AAVs can infect people of any age, but kids between one and five years old tend to get them most often. In the study mentioned in the passage, most of the children infected had an average age of three years old.
Recently, there have been fewer cases of a serious kind of hepatitis in children. Chiu said the best way to protect kids from getting this kind of sickness is by washing hands and staying home if they are feeling sick.
Thirty experts looked at adeno-associated virus type 2 in American children with serious hepatitis. The results of the research were published on March 30th, 2023 in Nature magazine. They discovered that the virus could be the cause of this kind of hepatitis. These experts gathered a lot of data to make their conclusion. This means that they had to look at a lot of information before making their determination!
This research was paid for by several organizations like Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The study covers two topics:
1. A case report about an illness called Severe fever with thrombocytopenia syndrome that is seen in China.
2. Examining how common hepatitis B co-infections are among prisoners who live with HIV/AIDS.
1. Can antibiotics help protect people with hepatitis B virus-related liver failure from getting an infection?
2. Does a medicine called Eylea prevent something called choroidal neovascularization from happening?
3. Is it possible to control a disease called hepatitis E in Jiangsu Province, China?
4. Where does the avian influenza virus exist during 2014 – 2018 in China?
1. Experts agree on how to test for myasthenia gravis, a type of antibody.
2. Scientists have come up with a way to regulate the movement of multiple transmitters.
3. Researchers are looking into the frequency and resonance created by ice vibration.
4. The discontinuous Galerkin Finite Element Method is used to better understand how two phases flow together and how they can interact in soft solid materials like soil or rocks.
