2022 was the bad year that wasn’t—at least for a mysterious paralyzing condition in children.
In the decade before, hundreds of young, healthy kids in the US abruptly felt their limbs go weak. Debilitating paralysis set in. In recent years, around half of affected children required intensive care. About a quarter needed mechanical ventilation. A few died, and many others appear to have permanent weakness and paralysis.
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Researchers quickly linked the rare polio-esque condition to a virus known for causing respiratory infections, often mild colds: enterovirus D68, or EV-D68 for short.
But when EV-D68 began surging, so did the mysterious paralyzing condition, called acute flaccid myelitis, or AFM.
In early September, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent a warning to clinicians through its Health Alert Network: EV-D68 is rising around the country.
“It’s surprising, totally,” Matthew Vogt, a pediatric infectious disease expert at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, told Ars.
Why do most children with EV-D68 get a mild respiratory infection and recover, while an unlucky few develop paralysis in the days afterward?
The study, appearing in the New England Journal of Medicine, found genetic material (RNA) and proteins from EV-D68 in motor neurons in the spinal cord of a 5-year-old boy who tragically died of an AFM-like illness in 2008.
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