CDC issues warning about mysterious illness in children
Transcript
We have an update to a story we brought you last week.
Teams of doctors across Europe and the US have been reporting more and more cases of what at first was thought to be Kawasaki disease.
Kawasaki disease is an inflammatory disease most commonly diagnosed in children under the age of five.
It causes awful rashes and destructive inflammation in a child’s body.
But what doctors are seeing now is different.
Children all over the world are displaying symptoms that include persistent fever, rash, abdominal pain, vomiting and swelling of the hands and feet.
Some children have died.
As a result, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is releasing an alert warning physicians about a new syndrome possibly associated with Covid-19.
It is now being referred to as multisystem inflammatory syndrome or MISC.
Health experts believe the illness stems from the body’s immune system overreacting to coronavirus.
A study published in “The Lancet” found that the number of children diagnosed with the Kawasaki-like disease in Bergamo, Italy jumped 30 fold after the pandemic overtook the region.
Physicians at Necker Hospital for sick children in Paris noticed an unusual cluster of children with the symptoms beginning last month, an 82% increase.
75 to 100 children in the United Kingdom appear to have contracted MISC.
And 15 US states are reporting cases of the illness.
But what’s baffling doctors is how the children are becoming infected to begin with.
Most children around the world have not left home to attend school or social gatherings due to stay at home orders.
Also why are children becoming infected now, months into this pandemic and why is it so devastating to children in the US and Europe but not so much in Asia where some of the first children were infected?
Health experts warn it shows there is still a lot they don’t know about Covid-19.
Posted – 5.15.20