Shari Rudavsky, Indianapolis Star and First Coast News
Two Jacksonville children are among more than 60 children in the United States afflicted with a rare polio-like illness that so far has left national health officials baffled as to its cause.
Since 2014, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has confirmed 386 cases of acute flaccid myelitis, or AFM, a disease that affects the nervous system and weakens the muscles and reflexes in a manner similar to polio.
However, no one diagnosed with this disease has tested positive for polio, officials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say.
On Your Side's Nick Perreault on Monday told you about 5-year-old Jack Greagor of Jacksonville. His mother brought him to the emergency room because his legs hurt.
“We ended up being there for seven weeks in the PICU, had to be intubated and has been on a ventilator ever since, 24/7,” his mother Jennifer said.
Jack was diagnosed with AFM.
First Coast News learned of another Jacksonville child on Wednesday who likely has the same disease.
Other viruses such as West Nile or enteroviruses as well as environmental toxins could lie behind the disease, health officials said in a press briefing earlier this week, but so far they have been been unable to pinpoint a single cause for the majority of cases they have seen.
“I am frustrated that despite all of our efforts we haven’t been able to identify the cause of this mystery illness,” said Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases Tuesday.
Nor have experts determined whether any risk factors increase the chance a child will develop AFM, or why some children recover quickly from this illness while other have ongoing paralysis.
What do they know is that cases typically peak in the summer and early fall months. This year so far the CDC has received reports of 127 cases and confirmed AFM in 62 of those. More than 90 percent of the confirmed cases have occurred in people 18 or younger and the average age of those with confirmed cases is four years old.
Cases have been confirmed in 22 states, including one in Indiana.
In 2014 from August to December, 120 children developed AFM, five in Indiana. The following year, when the nation saw 22 confirmed cases of the disease, Indiana had none. Two years ago, 149 people were sickened, four in Indiana, health officials said.
Last year, which saw 33 cases and one death nationwide, there were two cases in Indiana.
An MRI which shows a spinal cord lesion only in gray matter is used to confirm cases in addition to patients’ developing sudden weakness in their legs and or arms.
CDC researchers have detected either enterovirus or rotovirus in several of the cases but given the pattern of the disease suspect another factor may to be blame.
“[I]f you are having the peaks of disease every late summer and early fall you would think we are finding a single agent,” Messonnier said in a press briefing. “That is what we are not finding.”
Other countries have seen cases of AFM but none have had the same pattern where it peaks every other year in a specific season, CDC officials said.
While Messonnier noted AFM is incredibly rare — less than one in a million — she also urged parents to be on the lookout for its signature symptom of weak limbs and to seek medical care immediately.