Reports of a small outbreak of a polio-like disease in California

vli

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Something that stood out for me was the asymmetry, which I don't think is typical in ME. However, I did suffer a unilateral facial palsy at age 5, soon after a bad case of chickenpox, I think
I DEFINITELY have asymmetrical limb weakness (only on the left side, never the right, in 14 years).
What's even more interesting for me is that for me it's not just confined to a limb - the entire left side of my body from my head to my feet is weaker than my right side, which always feels fine.
I looked this up a long time ago and I think it was a symptom of Rasmussen's encephalitis.
 

Sidereal

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I DEFINITELY have asymmetrical limb weakness (only on the left side, never the right, in 14 years).
What's even more interesting for me is that for me it's not just confined to a limb - the entire left side of my body from my head to my feet is weaker than my right side, which always feels fine.

Same here.
 

Bob

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That sort of asymmetric symptom seems to suggest that nerves might be involved, doesn't it? e.g. infection/inflammation of nerves. Otherwise, a neurological problem that affects a specific region of the brain or spinal cord.
 

u&iraok

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Snips from article today from HSI - note info that I bolded (always wondered why polio outbreaks happened in summer, this could be why), especially the last sentence. . 'Ding!': are pesticides the missing link? Pesticides are implicated as one of the main causes of Gulf War Syndrome.

"Just a couple months back I exposed the truth about a devastating virus that swept through America last year. It left thousands of otherwise healthy people -- mostly children -- fighting for their lives. More than 100 kids were crippled. Many are still on ventilators to help them breathe. And only two victims have fully recovered. The mainstream and even the feds called it enterovirus D68 (EV-D68). But doctors and infectious disease specialists had another name for it.

Polio."

" "I saw polio in India. This looks like polio." That's what a prominent neurologist told Dr. Carol Glasser -- who is a former medical officer with the California Department of Public Health -- about the infection that left scores of children in the U.S. paralyzed last year."

"That pattern of summer outbreaks is still being called a mystery by many, but many doctors and investigative journalists believe they know the answer. Dangerous pesticides are serving as a "toxic co-factor," something Dr. Humphries says can create a "monster out of a normally benign gut virus." "

"The timing of past polio outbreaks (including the outbreak last year) always coincided with heavy use of pesticides, especially arsenic-based ones and DDT. Dr. Humphries notes that DDT was phased out in the U.S. and Canada in the early 1960s, right around the time we saw a decline in polio cases. And in India, a country that still makes and uses the chemicals, polio outbreaks are still common. Two journalists, Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill, have spent years documenting the pesticide connection in past polio outbreaks, as well as what's going on now. They've even discovered that a rise of polio cases in 1890 and the big outbreak of paralytic polio at the end of World War II happened at the same time that new agricultural chemicals were being introduced and used. "What's involved," they write, "is not just a virus, nor an environmental hazard," but a combination of the two. When someone with an active infection, something that might only give them a minor illness or even no symptoms at all, is exposed to a toxic pesticide, "the toxin could allow the virus to reach the spine."
 

Hip

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"The timing of past polio outbreaks (including the outbreak last year) always coincided with heavy use of pesticides, especially arsenic-based ones and DDT.

Poliovirus tends to circulate in the spring and summertime, which I presume is the time that pesticides are sprayed or applied. So you would expect polio to appear with the same timing as pesticide deployment.

Having said that, there are quite a few studies which show ME/CFS risk is increased by both significant organochlorine and organophosphate pesticide exposure, so it's not inconceivable that pesticides might increase the chances that poliovirus triggers poliomyelitis.
 

u&iraok

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Interesting about the studies that show that ME/CFS risk is increased by pesticide exposure.

I also wondered if there were some connection somewhere regarding the spine in ME/CFS and pesticide exposure as in polio.
 

me/cfs 27931

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Science closing in on polio-like virus that paralyzed children
http://www.sfchronicle.com/health/article/Science-closing-in-on-polio-like-virus-that-10961180.php

Scientists are closer than ever to proving that new strains of an old virus are to blame for recent waves of polio-like paralysis in children that have stumped doctors and alarmed parents across the country.

Laboratory mice exposed to the virus, called Enterovirus D68, often developed sudden-onset paralysis in one or more limbs a few days later, according to research published last week by a team of scientists from UCSF, the University of Colorado School of Medicine and the California Department of Public Health.

Studies in mice don’t always translate well to humans. But infectious-disease experts said the new research is probably the best proof they can obtain that the enterovirus was responsible for the polio-like illness that hit more than 200 children in the U.S. — including several in the Bay Area — in 2014 and again last year.
...

Infectious disease experts said they hope the new research will encourage other scientists to home in on Enterovirus D68 and how it affects the human body, and ultimately develop a vaccine or drugs to treat it and prevent paralysis.

“This paper is a watershed event. It’s the step that needed to happen to move into the really critical steps of developing treatments for this really bad disease,” said Dr. Keith Van Haren, a Stanford neurologist who treated some of the first Bay Area paralysis patients and was not involved in the new research.

The paralysis outbreak emerged in early 2014, when California public health officials said at least 20 children in the state had been afflicted with a “polio-like illness.” The children typically lost movement in one or more limbs, often after suffering what had seemed like a bad cold, and the damage tended to be permanent.
...

Then a wave of severe respiratory infections definitively linked to Enterovirus D68 swept over much of the United States, ultimately affecting more than 1,000 children — and intensifying interest in the virus.

Chiu and other scientists soon learned that the virus had mutated, undergoing small but important changes in its genetic code since it was first identified in the 1960s. Those mutations may have made it suddenly more dangerous, with the potential to cause severe respiratory illness and, occasionally, paralysis.

Still, scientists couldn’t link Enterovirus D68 directly to paralysis in children. In the 2014 outbreak, doctors were able to find the virus in spinal fluid — a strong indicator that it had infected the nervous system — in only one patient. The only places they could consistently find it was in the blood or respiratory secretions, and in half of patients they were never able to detect the virus.

What scientists needed was proof that the mutated virus could cause paralysis. The mouse findings appear to do just that.
...

“A lot of people were dubious about Enterovirus D68 because they said, ‘Gosh, this virus isn’t known to be neurotropic and we’re not finding it in the spinal fluid,’” said Dr. Kenneth Tyler, a University of Colorado neurologist and the senior author of the paper. “We asked, ‘Would these (strains) produce a neurologic disease in mice, and would it be similar to what we saw in humans?’ And the answer was a resounding yes.”

The next step for scientists will be learning more about how Enterovirus D68 works and seeking ways to treat or prevent it. Encouragingly, the scientists found that healthy mice that were given antibodies from infected animals appeared to be protected, which bodes well for the prospect of a vaccine.

Infectious disease experts said they hope the new research will also encourage public health authorities to boost surveillance of Enterovirus D68, which can be difficult to detect. Most labs aren’t equipped to test for the virus.
 
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