Between April and July of this year, 1,010 cases of severe hepatitis without any explainable cause were reported in children in more than 35 countries.
Nearly half of these cases were in Europe, including over a quarter in the UK.
However, given how common adenoviruses are in children – and because they rarely cause hepatitis in healthy people – it was difficult to say this was the probable cause. The team found that all nine children had been infected with adeno-associated virus 2. They then compared their findings with 13 healthy children and 12 children who’d had adenovirus infections but no hepatitis. Adeno-associated virus 2 was not detected in any of these children. This was a strong indicator that AAV2 was a cause of these mystery hepatitis cases.
Immune systems and infections But both AAV2 and infections such as adenovirus and herpes virus are quite common in children, and most children infected with these don’t go on to develop hepatitis. This means there must be an additional factor at play here, perhaps even at the genetic level. The researchers found that eight out of the nine children had a higher genetic prevalence of a certain type of human leucocyte antigen, which may have increased their likelihood of getting hepatitis symptoms from these viral infections. This type is also more common in people of European descent, which may further explain why these hepatitis cases were mainly seen in Europe.
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