Earlier, I weighed in on how the media and administration are handling the Ebola epidemic, using language to minimize the fact that it is a hemorrhagic fever.
It the wake of reports that Colorado children who suffered from an infection of the very aggressive respiratory pathogen, Enterovirus D-68, have also experienced limb paralysis, today’s “Bio-Insurrection” research has revealed that there is a nice, new moniker associated with it: Non-Polio Enterovirus.
From our Department of Health:
I made this discovery while I was searching for confirmation that a child’s recent death was associated with an Enterovirus D-68 infection. Sadly, it was.
Eli — a sweet, active, blonde-haired preschooler — had gone to sleep feeling fine, perhaps dreaming of playing with his sisters or having a fun day at school.He didn’t make it through the night.While the young boy died sometime between the night of Wednesday, September 24, and the following morning, it wasn’t until Friday night that authorities figured out why: enterovirus D68, a particularly pernicious strain of an otherwise common virus that has been particularly widespread this year.While it’s been detected in at least four people who died, Eli’s case is the first in which authorities have definitively cited enterovirus D68 as the cause of death.Jeff Plunkett, the health officer in Eli’s hometown of Hamilton Township, New Jersey, explained Saturday that, while the boy was born premature, “he had no other existing condition” and his parents no reason to believe he was direly ill before the virus took his life. Eli was 4.“He was asymptomatic and fine, and the next morning he had passed,” Plunkett told reporters. “So the onset was very rapid, very sudden. And that’s clearly the big difference (between enterovirus D68 and other enterovirus strains).”
This is the fifth death associated with the virus.
And even more troubling: The child showed none of the classic symptoms of the disease.
The death of 4-year-old Eli Waller is the first to be blamed on the virus that has swept the country, but health officials say he went to bed with none of its symptoms, which include cold-like symptoms but in some cases can involve wheezing and difficulty breathing.
I have always wondered that this recent outbreak was tied into the over 50,000 South and Central American children who flooded the system earlier this spring and summer and who are now being mainstreamed into our school system, because the initial outbreaks occurred so close to the start of the academic year. Investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson had the same question:
The CDC hasn’t suggested reasons for the current uptick or its origin. Without that answer, some question whether the disease is being spread by the presence of tens of thousands of illegal immigrant children from Central America admitted to the U.S. in the past year.The origin could be entirely unrelated.However, a study published in Virology Journal, found EV-D68 among some of the 3,375 young, ill people tested in eight Latin American countries, including the Central American nations of El Salvador and Nicaragua, in 2013. Though the U.S. government is keeping secret the locations of the illegal immigrant children, there are significant numbers of them in both cities in which the current outbreak was first identified, Kansas City, Missouri and Chicago, Illinois, according to local advocates and press reports.
Also, there are reports that adults may have died as a result of Enterovirus-D68 infection:
At least two Colorado adults have died from complications from what may be enterovirus-68, the same strain that has afflicted hundreds, mostly children, across the country.Dr. Phil Emrie, a critical care pulmonologist at Lutheran Medical Center in Wheat Ridge, says he treated adult patients who suffered from conditions similar to the virus.“We don’t know for sure that it’s the enterovirus-68, but we do know that it’s consistent with the illness that they’re seeing in children,” Emrie said.
The CBS Dever video offers the details:
Attkisson’s report also included one very disturbing revelation related specifically to polio: The European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (ECDC) released an assessment on Monday of the accidental release of more than 11 gallons of concentrated live poliovirus into the environment in Belgium.
The officials state the risk of infection is very low, due to the dilution factor and the high vaccination rate for polio.
At least the Europeans didn’t opt to rebrand polio in their statement. And while Eneterovirus D-68 isn’t the polio virus, the fact remains that it is a potentially fatal disease and nobody has a definitive answer about the paralysis that has been associated with the illness.
All that’s left now is to have Enterovirus D-68 epidemic blamed on the Republicans.
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