A recent study led by researchers at UC San Francisco is making progress in uncovering the reasons behind a puzzling outbreak of acute severe hepatitis in healthy children that emerged in the spring of 2022, following the easing of COVID-19 lockdowns in 35 countries, including the United States.
Hepatitis is a viral infection that causes inflammation of the liver. It can be acute, meaning it develops suddenly and lasts for a short time, or chronic, meaning it persists for a long period of time. The most common types of hepatitis are A, B, and C, each of which is caused by a different virus.
“We were surprised by the fact that the infections we detected in these children were caused not by an unusual, emerging virus, but by common childhood viral pathogens,” said Charles Chiu, MD, Ph.D., professor of laboratory medicine and medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases, director of the UCSF Clinical Microbiology Laboratory, and senior author of the paper.
By August 2022, clusters of cases were reported in 35 countries, including the U. S., where 358 cases were under investigation. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention launched an investigation into the causes.
Chiu noted the results mirrored the findings of two concurrent studies conducted in the United Kingdom, which identified the same AAV2 strain. All three studies identified co-infections from multiple viruses, and 75% of the children in the U.S. study had three or four viral infections.
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