The American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) believe that an adenovirus "could cause" the nine cases of severe childhood hepatitis registered in Alabama, the state from which the alarms about this disease have been raised.
In a study released Friday, the CDC said that while an adenovirus may be the cause of severe childhood hepatitis in Alabama, given that patients have tested positive for this virus, they are not ruling out others. factors they are investigating.
What they have determined is that the disease was not caused by the hepatitis A, B or C virus, nor by a SARS-Cov-2 infection that causes covid-19.
They have also ruled out autoimmune hepatitis or Wilson’s disease (an inherited disorder that causes an excessive accumulation of copper in the organs).
The type of adenovirus found in most patients is type 41, which is spread mainly by the fecal-oral route, mainly affects the intestine and is a common cause of acute gastroenteritis, with diarrhea, fever and respiratory symptoms .
The CDC has conducted this study on the information they have received of 9 cases of severe childhood hepatitis in children between 1 and 6 years old – 7 of them girls – since last fall in Alabama, of which some showed liver failure acute.
All of them have recovered, despite the fact that two have had to undergo a liver transplant.
The CDC report focuses on Alabama, since that is where alarms were raised in the US about severe childhood hepatitis that has also appeared in other countries around the world.
Last week, the CDC issued an alert advising US doctors to look out for rare cases of hepatitis.
Currently, more than a dozen cases are being investigated in eight states: Delaware, Louisiana, Illinois, North Carolina, New York, Georgia, Tennessee and Wisconsin (the death of a minor is being studied in the latter).
So far, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), at least 169 cases of acute childhood hepatitis of unknown origin have been confirmed in 11 countries, one of them fatal.
Most of the cases have been registered in Europe, except for 9 confirmed in the United States and 12 in Israel. The United Kingdom is the one that has reported the most (114), followed by Spain (13), the WHO said in a statement issued on April 23.