Hepatitis outbreak in children

[MumbleCrumbs]

I'm currently really quite unwell with Covid and not sleeping very well so please be gentle, but is anyone else really worried about the reports of this hepatitis outbreak in children now being monitored by the WHO? It seems to have gained traction over the last few days and lots of reports coming out about it now. I know very little about hepatitis but I know its quite rare to see such severe cases in children. Could Covid be the cause? I'm just feeling really quite worried about it and so sad for these poor children and their families, how horrendous after we've all just come through a pandemic .

Yes we don't know yet, and we probably won't know the counter-factual of whether it and/or other health conditions would have been worse overall with no lockdown and COVID had 'run free'. Until then, assertions about the costs and benefits of lockdown just perhaps reflect the prejudices or agenda of the poster.

"Unbelievable that so many scientists and experts in this field were all misquoted on the same day.

Imagine if they’d all come out saying they thought it was to do with Covid. And I said ‘well they must all have been misquoted’. I wouldn’t have a leg to stand on"

Quite!!

@anunimaginativeusername This is simply a discussion! What difference is it going to make to the situation. Surely we can still debate our different thoughts on the matter.

The fact is that the sources linked to where scientists said lockdown may have been a causal factor ALSO said that maybe covid infection could have been a causal factor AND that they thought the proximal cause may be an adenovirus.

It's not either or and ALL of those sources said they pretty much don't know yet.

I'm not saying (unlike other posters) that it's definitely one thing or the other and definitely not some other thing. We don't know.

But lockdown was a long time ago, for any child, so it's interesting to see why this is happening. I wonder if babies under 1 are affected because for the past year restrictions have been pretty much non existent in England so any child under 1 will have had near normal (if anything perhaps higher) levels of circulating viruses etc.

This is the actual quote about the leading hypothesis from Dr Chand in the article screenshotted by @Delatron in her 26/04 11:55 post:

“I think our leading hypothesis, given the data that we’ve seen, is that we probably have a normal adenovirus circulating, but we have a co-factor affecting a particular age group of young children which is either rendering that infection more severe, or causing it to trigger some kind of [inappropriate immune response],” said Chand.

This is then followed by a quote from Professor Deirdre Kelly:

'Prof Deirdre Kelly, a paediatric hepatologist at Birmingham Women’s and Children’s NHS trust and part of a group working with UKHSA to investigate the cases, said: “It may be due to the fact that children who have been largely isolated are responding to viruses that they would normally have built up an immunity to at an early age or it could be previous infection with Covid that has affected the body’s defence systems.”'

www.theguardian.com/society/2022/apr/25/ten-uk-children-require-transplant-amid-surge-in-hepatitis-cases

This is the actual quote from the article screenshotted by @Organictangerine in this post (I have added the bolding as the impression given was that Prof Kelly had said that lockdowns were the most likely reason, and we can see that from the quote this is not the case):

'Prof Deirdre Kelly, professor of Paediatric Hepatology at the Birmingham Women’s & Children’s Hospital, added: “We think it must be related to the pandemic, either because Covid has changed these children’s immunity in some way, or because they weren't exposed to their normal childhood viruses because of isolation at different stages.”

She added, though, that the cases may be caused by another virus or infectious agent that is yet to be identified.'

www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/hepatitis-outbreak-uk-2022-acute-paediatric-viral-symptoms-cases-children/

You're deliberately misrepresenting what I posted.

There is a massive gap between disagreeing with lockdown measures and being a zealot who thinks alcohol gel can cause hepatitis. I did not categorise all people who disagree with lockdown as being of the same ilk.

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion but not their own facts. Facts are important, especially when discussing science and health. And a headline writer's opinion does not trump scientific research. I listed above the five hypothesis in the current paper being discussed and the findings in the Indian research paper.

Please don't tag me again. If you disagree that science and facts are important and should be given more weight than headline writers and MNers with an agenda, you can just scroll past my posts and read the 'opinion' posts that suit you better.

Another couple of articles on the outbreak:

explainer (on andenovirus 41, the possible culprit)

covid role?

It doesn't matter how long ago lockdown happened. Babies born since March 2020 and up until fairly recently have not built up their immune systems in their first year of life as they normally would. Hence they are at more risk now we are getting back to normal. And for some it might cause life long problems. As having infections in the first year of life prime the immune system. It's thought that if a child is not ill in the first year of life then their immune system over reacts when it does face infection.

It's like the Blind Men and the Elephant here.

It's not just very young children who were locked down being affected though. Numerous reports have said the eldest affected was 16 and the youngest just a few months old, born after lockdown had happened.

Just seen this in the news, concerning.

How awful for the parents of all the children but must have been particularly awful when the baby was only a few months old. That baby was definitely born after all restrictions were well and truly ditched. Covid infections will have been very high when they were born, but lockdowns cannot have caused their susceptibility.

Who knows though, at this point they simply don't know what's causing it. Let's hope they figure it out quickly and also how to intervene and prevent the damage.

Many children weren't physically attending school between the end of March and the beginning of September. They didn't miss five months of school (compared to non-pandemic years) during this period, though, because schools aren't open continuously.

Children are normally off school for the Easter holidays, summer half term and summer holidays, autumn half term, Christmas holidays, and the spring half term.

Our school was closed for a week in March 2020 at the end of the spring term, physically open for children of key workers & lessons online for everyone else during the summer term, open in the autumn term, and back to key workers + online for some of the spring term - all back in for the last three weeks. Less than two terms out of school overall.

Apparently there was a surge of hepatitis in children after the 1918 pandemic also.

Prof Deirdre Kelly, a paediatric hepatologist at Birmingham Women’s and Children’s NHS trust and part of a group working with UKHSA to investigate the cases, said that the surge seemed likely to be related to the pandemic and that the group had found a medical report from 1924 describing an increase in child hepatitis after the 1918 influenza pandemic. “They also had a surge in hepatitis, which is fascinating,” Kelly said.

guardian

I listened to Dr Chand on the radio yesterday discussing adenovirus and co-factors and how adenovirus doesn't usually lead to hepatitis in children in this way. As with most new things it sounded as if there was an awful lot they still don't know. I suppose with the youngest children there may have been less chance of knowing if they had previously been infected with Covid as they are harder to test or parents are less willing to test. She did say there was a higher proportion of those children affected by Hepatitis in Israel who had previously been infected with Covid but their number of hepatitis cases is lower overall so still no proven correlation.

Still a new additional worry. Hopefully there will be more findings soon or the number of children affected will drop.

@DaisyQuakeJohnson I haven't miss quoted you, free speech means you don't get to choose what other people can or can't say. That's the point, just because you don't think using alcohol gel has caused any problems it doesn't mean social media should ban anyone else who wishes to discuss the subject further Especially when back in 2018 there were warnings about alcohol gel creating superbugs. I am sure I remember the NHS asked people to stop using alcohol based gels at home as hospitals were having problems with these superbugs. So it's not the greatest leap to think the massive alcohol gel use along with all the other social distancing measures may we'll be a causal agent in this matter.

Science is not a group of people who all agree. It's people (or should be) who question all the time and actively try to disprove their hypothesis. Science isn't fact it's what is most known at the time hence medical advice changes all the time.

People can read something and make up their own minds. It's critical thinking and is underused in my opinion.

More children die from hepatitis...

Indonesia

How awful for those parents, and worrying for others.

The age of the children in this case suggest its not a clear case of no immunity to childhood infections. Does immunity wane over time? I suppose that's something they'll be looking into.

Awful and so worrying

Though the systems to try to figure this out are ramping up. Today the BPSU (British Paediatric Surveillance Unit) electronic reporting cards went out to every paediatric consultant in the country, and the new category of acute hepatitis was on it, updated from last month. So every case which has reached hospital in the UK in the last month, even if not in the heavily promoted national research project, will have anonymised data fed back for central analysis. And every case going forward. More data will be coming in far more systematically. We will know more. Hopefully soon.

Is there any information on how long between having adenovirus symptoms and having symptoms for hepatitis?

Just wondering what the timeline is (if adenovirus is the potential cause).

The Independent has a story noting that UK cases are up to 163. That's a jump from.the last reported figures.

I feel like this is being underreported. 11 UK children have required liver transplants and will now have to take immunosuppressant drugs for life and have a significantly shortened life span and huge impact on their quality of life.

I'd like to see more reporting of the location of the cases, are they clustered or spread out?