Physicians have conflicting theories about what is causing healthy young children across the world to suddenly become jaundiced and fall seriously ill with acute liver inflammation.
“The fact you have it in over 70% of cases does suggest that it must have a role,” says Deirdre Kelly, a pediatric hepatologist at Birmingham Children’s Hospital, one of a group of technical experts advising UKHSA.
The skeptics note that liver biopsies from the affected children have failed to find cells stuffed with adenovirus, a classic sign of adenoviral hepatitis. They say, sometimes heatedly, that the agencies are overlooking a more likely culprit, SARS-COV-2. Only some of the children with hepatitis are currently infected with SARS-CoV-2;in the United Kingdom, the figure was 18%. But a recent CDC study estimated that younger than 12 have been infected, 31% of them between December 2021 and February. A publication by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control last week reported evidence of prior SARS-CoV-2 infection in 14 of 19 children with hepatitis. It also showed that most of the cases in Europe, during a large Omicron wave.