'It's important to note that this is an evolving situation, and we are casting a wide net to help broaden our understanding,' said Dr. Jay Butler, the CDC's deputy director of infectious diseases.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday that it's investigating 109 cases of severe and unexplained hepatitis in children in 25 states and territories that may be linked to a worldwide outbreak.Nearly all the children -- more than 90% -- needed to be hospitalized.
It's not clear what's driving these cases in young children. Butler said some of the common causes of viral hepatitis have been considered but were not found in any of the cases.Early hepatitis reports Cases are under investigation in Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, North Carolina, North Dakota, Nebraska, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico, Tennessee, Texas, Washington and Wisconsin.
Bhatt says liver failure in kids is"super rare." And even before scientists started tracking this outbreak, half of cases were never explained."Even during the first case, I thought it was weird," says Dr. Markus Buchfellner, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where staffers started seeing cases in October.
Since those cases were reported, two more children in Alabama have been identified. Their cases are under investigation, bringing the state's total to 11, said Dr. Wes Stubblefield, medical officer for Alabama's Northern and Northeastern Districts. Investigators have tried to sequence the entire genome of an adenovirus from one of the patients but have not been able to get a sample with enough of the virus to do that. There were 18 cases in which where they were able to partially sequence the genome, and all of them have been adenovirus 41F, the same one found in the US cases.
Researchers also want to know if the hepatitis is part of some kind of syndrome that strikes kids after a SARS-CoV-2 infection, like the rare complication called multisystem inflammtory syndrome in children, or MIS-C. "All nine of them have liver biopsies that were showing lots of inflammation and hepatitis. But we did not find the virus in the liver. We only found the virus in the blood," he said.
His second theory is that it's not the virus itself that's responsible for the liver damage, but perhaps the immune system overreacts when trying to fight off the virus and ends up damaging the liver.
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