Investigative Reporter Links EV-D68 to Illegal Immigrants

You may remember that just yesterday, I was discussing speculating how the "new" entro-virus D68, the one causing polio-like illness in people across the country may have been reintroduced by the flood of illegal immigrants, particularly children from Central America.  Tom McGuire of Just One Minute had made the point that he thought it unlikely because of the geographical nature of the illness, with Texas not being a particularly hot spot of D68. Now Sharyl Atkisson, the fugitive investigative reporter, formerly with CBS, tentatively ties D68 outbreaks to the immigrant children:

Polio-like illness claims fifth life in U.S.

The CDC reports that in the past month and a half, at least 538 people in 43 states and the District of Columbia have become ill with EV-D68. Most of them are children and some developed limb paralysis. Polio, which can cause paralysis and death, is a type of enterovirus. EV-D68 is one of more than a hundred “non-polio” enteroviruses.
The actual number of EV-D68 infections is likely significantly higher than reported since some state health officials are not testing every suspected case.

Link to Illegal Immigrant Children?

Enteroviruses commonly circulate in the U.S. during summer and fall. EV-D68 was first identified in California in 1962. Over the past thirty years, only small numbers were reported in the U.S.

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. (See Fig. 3)

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.

The Main Stream Media is definitely trying to overlook this possibility, even going as far as pointing to Africa and Asia as possible sources of D68, while ignoring our southern border issues, for obvious partisan political purposes. I'm developing a fondness for Sharyl Atkisson's new role as a picador for the sacred cows of modern journalism.

At this point, it is kind of irrelevant where D68 came from. It's here, it's spreading rapidly, and it's causing deaths and paralysis in some small fraction of the cases.

The parallels with polio are astonishing.  Both are entero-viruses, and despite the popular conception of polio as an Ebola like killer (I'm old enough to remember when it was a huge problem), in most cases, polio manifested as a rather mild, cold or flu like disease. It's thought that the epidemics of paralyzing polio cases of the early to mid 1900s was caused by, get this, improved sanitation, resulting in people getting it later in life, and without maternal antibodies to it to protect them.

Although approximately 90% of polio infections cause no symptoms at all, affected individuals can exhibit a range of symptoms if the virus enters the blood stream. In about 1% of cases, the virus enters the central nervous system, preferentially infecting and destroying motor neurons, leading to muscle weakness and acute flaccid paralysis.
. . .
Major polio epidemics started to appear in the late 19th century in Europe and soon after the United States,and it became one of the most dreaded childhood diseases of the 20th century. The epidemics are attributed to better sanitation which reduced the prevalence of the disease among young children who were more likely to be asymptomatic. Survivors then develop immunity. By 1910, much of the world experienced a dramatic increase in polio cases and epidemics became regular events, primarily in cities during the summer months. These epidemics—which left thousands of children and adults paralyzed—provided the impetus for a "Great Race" towards the development of a vaccine.

It's been a long time since D68 circulated widely in the US, and very few now carry any immunity to the disease.  Maybe we should be thinking about a vaccine. Then we could treat it here, and abroad.