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News > Argentina

Unknown-Cause Acute Child Hepatitis Spreads To Latin America

  • A child recovers from hepatitis.

    A child recovers from hepatitis. | Photo: Twitter/ @MiradaCriticaMC

Published 6 May 2022
Opinion

This disease, which causes abdominal pains, diarrhea, and vomiting, was first reported to appear in U.K. children without previous medical conditions on April 5.

On Wednesday, Argentina reported the first unknown-cause acute childhood hepatitis case in Latin America in an eight-year-old patient who is being treated at the Rosario City Children Hospital. 

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This disease, which causes abdominal pains, diarrhea, and vomiting, was first reported to appear in U.K. children without previous medical conditions on April 5. Since then, similar cases have been found in 19 other countries, including Belgium, Denmark, Spain, the United States, Italy, and Indonesia.

So far, four children have died from this unknown-cause disease, and a tenth of those who have been affected have needed a liver transplant. "These records are unusual and worrying," said Zania Stamataki, a scientist at the Birmingham University Centre for Liver and Gastrointestinal Research.

The World Health Organization (WHO) ongoing research has not yet established a cause of the disease and excluded viral hepatitis types A, B, C, D, and E, everyday exposure, international travel, or COVID vaccination as factors to it.

Nevertheless, Europe’s Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) research showed that the hepatitis outbreak could be linked to a type 41 adenovirus, which causes the common cold and was detected in 74 children positive for hepatitis.

“Young children who have spent their formative stages under coronavirus-related lockdowns had not built up immunity to adenoviruses,” ECDC anti-microbial resistance expert Aikaterini Mougkou lamented and stressed that adenovirus combining with other factors make hepatitis more severe in children.

“We urge countries to work hard to identify and report any potential case of the disease so that we can have enough information to continue researching,” Mougkou stated.

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