The Main Suspect Behind an Ominous Spike in a Polio-like Illness
As the summer of 2014 gave way to fall, Kevin Messacar, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital Colorado, started seeing a wave of children with inexplicable paralysis. All of them shared the same story. One day, they had a cold. The next, they couldn’t move an arm or a leg. In some children, the paralysis was relatively mild, but others had to be supported with ventilators and feeding tubes after they stopped being able to breathe or swallow on their own.
The condition looked remarkably like polio—the viral disease that is on the verge of being eradicated worldwide. But none of the kids tested positive for poliovirus. Instead, their condition was given a new name: acute flaccid myelitis, or AFM. That year, 120 people, mostly young children, developed the condition across 34 states. The cases peaked in September and then rapidly tailed off.
“We didn’t know if it would go away,” Messacar says. “Unfortunately, it came back.”
After just a few dozen new cases the following year, AFM returned in force in 2016, afflicting 149 more people. The next year: another lull. And in 2018: another spike, with 62 confirmed cases so far and at least 93 more under investigation. Parents have described their children collapsing mid-run like “marionette dolls,” or going to bed with a fever and waking up paralyzed from the neck down.
This third wave confirms what many doctors had feared: from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “We don’t really know much more than we knew in 2014—but we’re trying.”
