POLIO-LIKE ILLNESS PARALYZING CHILDREN IN CALIFORNIA

By Miriam Raftery

February 23, 2014 (San Diego's East County) - A frightening, polio-like illness  has stricken some 25 children in California, leaving them paralyzed, USA Today reports.  All have lost the ability to move at least one arm or leg, and some have lost all four limbs.

Tests have confirmed that the mysterious is definitely not polio.  Researchers suspect a virus, but so far, no treatments have proven effective.

The first case in California occurred in 2012 , striking a two year old child in Berkeley. Similar cases have been reported in Asia and Australia, though thus far Cailfornia is the only state in the U.S. to report the polio-like afflictions.

State health officials are working closely with the Centers for Disease Control to identify any additional cases, and doctors are asked to report any polio-like symptoms.

Emmanuelle Waubant, a professor of neurology and pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco, treated a child who became suddenly paralyzed even though he had an immunity to polio. So she and other scientists began researching a database of neureologic patients and found five children in the San Francisco area. Two of them tested positive for Human Enterovirus, or HEV 68, which has previously been associated with polio-like symptoms. But the other three children did not have this virus.

USA Today reports that the syndrome has now affected as many as 25 California children with polio-like symptoms.

Polio was once a widespread epidemic.  Most people afflicted with it recovered or had no symptoms, but about 1% were left paralyzed, and some did not survive. Polio afflicts the spinal cord and limbs, also weakening the lungs.  In the 1940s and 50s, quarantines were imposed to prevent the spread of polio.

The feared disease once paralyzed 20,000 people a year, mostly children, in The U.S. alone before the Salk vaccine was developed by Dr. Jonas Salk here in San Diego. 

Thanks to vaccines, polio today has been eradicated in almost every nation of the world, except for Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria, where fundamentalist Muslims have banned the vaccine.