CDC investigating more than 100 cases of unexplained hepatitis in children, including 5 deaths
By Brenda Goodman, CNN
(CNN) -- The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Friday it's investigating 109 cases of severe and unexplained hepatitis in children in 25 states that may be linked to a worldwide outbreak.
Eight children have needed liver transplants. Five have died.
Nearly all the children -- 94% -- needed to be hospitalized.
Dr. Jay Butler, the CDC's deputy director of infectious diseases stressed that the investigation -- a partnership between the CDC and state health departments -- is an evolving situation. Not all the hepatitis cases they are studying now may ultimately be caused by the same thing.
Hepatitis, or swelling of the liver, can be caused by infections, autoimmune diseases, drugs and toxins. A family of viruses well known for attacking the liver causes hepatitis A, hepatitis B and hepatitis C.
It's not yet 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. Adenovirus has been detected in some of the children, although its role isn't clear.
Early hepatitis reports
On April 21, the CDC alerted doctors to a cluster of unusual cases of hepatitis in nine children in Alabama.
The agency asked doctors and public health officials to notify the agency if they had similar cases of children under the age of 10 with elevated liver enzymes and no apparent explanation for their hepatitis dating back to October 2021.
Since then, state health departments have been working with pediatric specialists in their states to identify possible cases. The numbers shared at Friday's news briefing are the first national look at cases in the United States.
The CDC's alert followed earlier reports from the UK and Europe of dozens of children from the England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland coming to hospitals with unexplained hepatitis.
As of May 1, there are 228 probable cases linked to the outbreak in 20 countries, with more than 50 cases under investigation, Dr. Philippa Easterbrook, a senior scientist in the World Health Organization's Global Hepatitis Program, said in a briefing on Wednesday. Among these cases, one child has died and around 18 have needed liver transplants, Easterbrook said.
Most of the children were healthy when they developed symptoms that included fatigue, loss of appetite, vomiting, diarrhea, belly pain, dark urine, light colored stools and yellowing of their skin and eyes -- a sign caused jaundice.
Unusually severe liver inflammation
Pediatric gastroenterologist Dr. Heli Bhatt from the University of Minnesota Medical Center has treated two children who are part of the CDC's investigation. One, a 2-year-old from South Dakota, had a liver transplant Friday morning.
Bhatt says liver failure in kids is "super rare." And even before scientists started tracking this outbreak, half of cases were never explained.
Doctors who have treated these children say their cases stood out.
"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 they first started seeing cases in October.
"And then when the second one came in that's when I said okay, we need to talk to someone about this." He reached out to senior physicians in his department who contacted the state health department and the CDC.
Buchfellner says the cases stood out because their liver inflammation was so severe.
Sometimes, common viruses like Epstein-Barr or even SARS-CoV2 will raise a child's liver enzymes a little, indicating what Buchfellner calls "small bits of hepatitis," but the kids typically recover as their bodies fight off the infection.
"But it's very odd to see a child who's healthy come in with the amount of liver injury that these kids had," he said.
Initially, UAB saw nine kids with unexplained hepatitis, and all nine tested positive for adenovirus in their blood.
Since those cases were first reported, two more children in Alabama have been identified, and their cases are under investigation, bringing the state's total to 11 cases under investigation, said Dr. Wes Stubblefield, medical officer for Alabama's Northern and Northeastern Districts in an interview with CNN.
There are about 100 different kinds of adenoviruses. About 50 of them are known to infect humans, so they needed a closer look at the virus to try to figure out if all the children had the same one.
When researchers tried to read the genes of the adenovirus in infected kids, only five had enough genetic material to get a full sequence. In all five, the virus was a particular kind of adenovirus called adenovirus 41, which typically causes diarrhea and vomiting in kids, sometimes with congestion or a cough, but has never before been associated with liver failure.
Clues from the UK
In addition to the CDC briefing, researchers with the UK Health Security Agency on Friday posted a new technical briefing with an update on its hepatitis investigation. Out of 163 cases, 126 patients have been tested for adenovirus, and 91, or 72% were positive for that pathogen.
Investigators have tried to sequence the entire genome of an adenovirus from one of the patients, but have not yet been able to get a sample with enough of the virus to do that. Out of 18 cases where they were able to partially sequence the genome of the virus, all 18 have been adenovirus 41F, the same one found in the US cases.
Many have wondered whether the cases may somehow be related to SARS-CoV2, the virus that causes Covid-19.
UK investigators say they're still looking at that possibility, but only 24 out of 132 patients tested -- 18% -- had SARS-CoV2 detected.
The report says they are not ruling out that some role for a Covid-19 infection in these cases. Perhaps a prior Covid-19 infection somehow primed the immune system to make these children unusually susceptible, or maybe a co-infection of the two viruses together overwhelms the liver. Researchers also want to know if maybe the hepatitis is part of some kind syndrome that strikes kids after a SARS-CoV2 infection, as the rare complication multisystem inflammtory syndrome in children, or MIS-C, does.
Another working theory from UK investigators is that maybe there's some kind of outsized or irregular immune response in these children, perhaps because they were sheltered more than usual during the pandemic.
Yet another theory is that the adenovirus may have always caused liver failure in a tiny percentage of children who were infected, and these rare cases are only coming to light because it is causing an exceptionally large wave of infections.
And investigators in the UK say they are still testing for drugs, toxins, or perhaps an environmental exposure, even though some kind of infection is probably more likely to be the cause.
Sorting out the role of adenovirus 41
Another thing that's puzzled doctors, Buchfellner says, is that they found adenovirus in blood samples, but not in samples of liver tissue taken during biopsies of the patients in Alabama.
"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.
Bhatt's case, a child from South Dakota, was also positive for adenovirus in her blood, but not in her liver.
If this adenovirus 41 is somehow responsible in these cases -- and that's still a big if -- Buchfellner says he doesn't know why it would only show up in the blood, but not in heavily damaged liver tissue, but he has some theories.
"Maybe the liver is clearing the virus before it's been cleared in the blood," he said. "And so by the time that the damage has been done to the liver, and we do the biopsy, the immune system has already cleared the virus from the liver. And what's leftover is just inflammation."
His second theory, he says is that maybe 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.
Adenovirus infections are common, so maybe finding the virus in some of these patients is just a coincidence. "We are not 100% sure that this is just that adenovirus. There's still a lot to be known," Bhatt says.
Active investigation
In an April 29 statement on the cases, the CDC wrote "we believe adenovirus may be the cause for these reported cases, but other potential environmental and situational factors are still being investigated."
According to the CDC, Some of the causes that have been ruled out so far include:
• Hepatitis viruses A, B, and C
• SARS-Cov2 infection
• Autoimmune hepatitis
• A rare genetic disorder called Wilson disease
"We are still telling our at least our families here in Alabama and I would encourage other families the same way not to be too concerned about this just yet." Buchfellner said. "I mean, at the end of the day, this is still a pretty rare phenomenon," he said.
Buchfellner says adnoviruses are commonly passed around daycares and schools. They typically cause nothing worse than something that feels like stomach flu for a few days.
"it's been around for a long time and it's gonna continue to go around. And in total, we only have around 200 cases that have been reported across the globe. So this isn't a Covid pandemic-like situation where everybody needs to be really concerned about this," he said.
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