The best available evidence points to a fairly common stomach bug.
NEW YORK — Health officials remain perplexed by mysterious cases of severe liver damage in hundreds of young children around the world.
Is there some mutated version of the adenovirus causing this? Or some other not-yet-identified germ, drug or toxin? More than 20 other countries have reported hundreds more cases in total, though the largest numbers have been in the U.K. and U.S. What did show up was adenovirus 41. More than half of the U.S. cases have tested positive for adenovirus, of which there are dozens of varieties. In a small number of specimens tested to see what kind of adenovirus was present, adenovirus 41 came up every time.
Adenovirus infections are not systematically tracked in the U.S., so it’s not clear if there’s been some recent surge in virus activity. In fact, adenoviruses are so common that researchers aren’t sure what to make of their presence in these cases. Indeed, many cases added to the tally in the last few weeks were not recent illnesses but rather earlier ones that were re-evaluated. About 10% of the U.S. cases occurred in May, Butler said. The rate seems to be relatively flat since the fall, he added.
But investigators are wondering about previous coronavirus infections. It’s possible that coronavirus particles lurking in the gut are playing a role, said Petter Brodin, a pediatric immunologist at Imperial College London.