Via The Washington Post: Parents of children with AFM warn about rare polio-like condition. Excerpt:
It started with a sinus infection. Then 4-year-old Camdyn Carr couldn’t move the right side of his face or lift his arm to scratch his nose.
His parents decided to take him a couple of hours away to see doctors who might be able to figure out what had afflicted their young boy. But as they drove from their Roanoke home to the University of Virginia, Carr’s whole body seized up and he was suddenly paralyzed.
Many tests later, Carr was diagnosed with the rare polio-like condition acute flaccid myelitis, or AFM. He is now a patient at Kennedy Krieger Institute, where his father, Christopher Carr, brought him for physical therapy and other treatment to try to get his son moving again.
AFM affects the gray matter in the spinal cord and can lead to paralysis, but is so rare that fewer than 1 in 1 million people, mostly children, contract it.
But a recent uptick in cases in the United States has put public health officials on alert and freaked out parents because of the severe symptoms that sometimes accompany it. Doctors don’t know exactly what is causing the mystery illness and there is no official treatment for it, raising the fear factor for some.
“So much of this doesn’t make sense to me,” said Christopher Carr, who is staying with Camdyn at Kennedy Krieger while the rest of the family remains at home. “I am hoping the physical therapy can help improve my son’s condition.”
The Centers for Disease Control held a teleconference Tuesday expressing concern about the disease, which has sickened 62 children this year and killed one. The CDC is investigating an additional 65 cases, including five children with the symptoms reported in Maryland.
Public health officials have not identified a common link among cases, but there seems to be a surge every couple of years.
The International Center for Spinal Cord Injury at Kennedy Krieger Institute has treated many cases from around the country, including six patients who are there now.
“Until we figure out if this is an infection or if this is an autoimmune process, until we figure out how to prevent it, then the effort to bring awareness to it and develop timely interventions is appropriate even if it is 1 in a million,” said Cristina L. Sadowsky, the center’s clinical director.
The most recent mention of AFM on the website of the Public Health Agency of Canada is this note from early 2016, which lists it as a possible consequence of an EV-D68 infection. The Washington Post story cites enteroviruses but doesn't specify them.
