Acute Flaccid Myelitis in Children.

Abstract

1. Daniel R. Taylor, DO* 2. Sharyu Krishnakumar, MD* 1. *Department of Pediatrics, Saint Christopher's Hospital for Children, Philadelphia, PA An excerpt from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in April 2019 describes a 3-year-old boy from the Atlanta area. scoots around on his bottom in the living room of his Winder home as he plays with a toy train set. When it's time for school, his mother helps the 3-year-old into a black wheelchair with blue and green bars on the frame and a red Lego robot keychain attached to the headrest. The article goes on to explain that AC has had 4 surgeries and multiple infusions and may require potentially lifelong physical and occupational therapy. This will never be over for us, his mother agonized in this article. AC was diagnosed earlier in the year as having acute flaccid myelitis (AFM). Reminiscent of this 2019 article, several children living in small pockets of Brooklyn, New York, in the summer of 1916 awoke and were not able to move their arms and legs. Terrified parents rushed their children to local health centers, where physicians were perplexed by these symptoms, with many physicians having gone through their entire careers without ever seeing a case of what they soon recognized was paralytic poliomyelitis (polio). By December 1916, the polio epidemic had spread from New York City to more than 2 dozen states, spreading to the Midwest. Within 7 months there were 27,000 reported cases of polio, and 6,000 people had died, with thousands more paralyzed or having permanent limb deformities. Fast forward 70 years to 1987, when doctors in the United States started reporting a few dozen cases of a severe respiratory illness tied to a virus that was first identified as enterovirus …