Evidence builds for virus as culprit in acute flaccid myelitis, a mysterious disease that paralyzes kids

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Since the first reports of the illness in 2012, the U.S. has experienced an increasingly bigger outbreak every other year, from late summer into fall.

Bove's son, Luca Waugh, illustrates the pattern: His whole family caught a cold in the summer of 2014 — and a few days later, Luca woke up with weakness in his neck that traveled down his shoulder. Despite fast hospitalization, within days he had body-wide paralysis and trouble breathing. He recovered gradually, and today still has some paralysis in his neck, shoulder and arm.

Either a germ or the body's reaction to a germ was damaging nerves in the spinal cords of patients like Luca. The CDC noted that AFM spikes coincided with seasons when— named EV-D68 and EV-A71 — were causing widespread respiratory illnesses. The problem: Doctors seldom found those viruses in the patients' spinal fluid, leaving doubt about the link.

Antibodies programmed to track specific germs only wind up in spinal fluid if they fought infection there — what Wilson's team set out to find. The researchers customized a Harvard-developed tool to search for evidence of hundreds of viruses simultaneously — including herpes,

 

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So, it isn’t caused by kids not getting vaccines? 🤔

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