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New Study Suggests Virus May be Responsible for Mysterious Polio-Like Illness

A new study published on Monday links a mysterious polio-like disease, which causes weakness in the muscles of its victims, with the virus. The disease called acute flaccid myelitis(AFM) is a rare disorder of the nervous system which affects the spinal cord of children. The new research is backed by several other researches that hint at the possibility of AFM being caused by some form of enterovirus.

The study published in the journal Nature Medicine suggests that mysterious illness which causes paralysis in children might be caused by a virus. The group of researchers from the University of California San Francisco has made a new medical breakthrough by identifying the virus in the spinal fluid of the affected children. A sophisticated tool called Virscan, built for detecting the presence of virus by detecting viral signature, revealed that about 70% of the affected children had the antibodies for two particular strains of the virus. After examining about 42 such patients, the researchers reestablished that there were antibodies for enterovirus strains D68 and A71 in their spinal fluid.

Study co-author Dr. Ryan Schubert, said in a statement that “When there’s an infection in the spinal cord, antibody-making immune cells travel there and make more antibodies. We think finding antibodies against enterovirus in the spinal fluid of AFM patients means the virus really does go to the spinal cord. This helps us lay the blame on these viruses.” Schubert is a clinical fellow in neurology at the University of California.

The paralysis causing disease was first observed back in 2012 and started being recorded since 2014. Scientists are still in the process of trying to conclusively study the cause of the mysterious disease which has affected more than 600 children in the US, as of now. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there has been recorded a total of 20 cases this year of the disease compared to above 200 such cases last year.

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