Theories emerge for mysterious liver illnesses in children

That virus was detected in the the blood of stricken children but — oddly — it has not been found in their diseased livers.“There’s a lot of things that don’t make sense,” said Eric Kremer, a virus researcher at the Institute of Molecular Genetics of Montpellier, in France.As health officials in more than a dozen countries look into the mystery, they are asking: — Has there been some surge in the stomach bug — called adenovirus 41 — that is causing more cases of a previously undetected problem?— Are children more susceptible due to pandemic-related lockdowns that sheltered them from the viruses kids usually experience?— Is there some mutated version of the adenovirus causing this? It’s possible that coronavirus particles lurking in the gut are playing a role, said Petter Brodin, a pediatric immunologist at Imperial College London.In a piece earlier this month in the medical journal Lancet, Brodin and another scientist suggested that a combination of lingering coronavirus and an adenovirus infection could trigger a liver-damaging immune system reaction.“I think it’s an unfortunate combination of circumstances that could explain this,” Brodin told the AP.Butler said researchers have seen complex reactions like that before, and investigators are discussing ways to better check out the hypothesis.He said it was “not out of the realm of plausibility, at all.”A Case Western Reserve University preprint study, which has yet to be peer reviewed, suggested children who had COVID-19 had a significantly higher risk of liver damage.Dr. Markus Buchfellner, a pediatric infectious diseases doctor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, was involved in the identification of the first U.S. cases in the fall.