Child brain abscesses tripled in Nevada in 2022, Pediatric neurosurgeon Dr. Taryn Bragg seeks pandemic correlation, Covid vaccinations for 12 year olds began in 2021
Child brain abscesses tripled in Nevada in 2022, Pediatric neurosurgeon Dr. Taryn Bragg seeks pandemic correlation, Covid vaccinations for 12 year olds began in 2021
From CNN.
“Doctors watching for more cases after mysterious cluster of brain infections strikes kids in southern Nevada
Disease detectives with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are investigating a cluster of rare and serious brain abscesses in kids in and around Las Vegas, Nevada, and doctors from other parts of the country say they may be seeing a rise in cases, too.
In 2022, the number of brain abscesses in kids tripled in Nevada, rising from an average of four to five a year to 18.
“In my 20 years’ experience, I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Dr. Taryn Bragg, an associate professor at the University of Utah who treated the cases.
Pediatric neurosurgeons like Bragg are rare. She is the only one for the entire state of Nevada, and because she treated all the cases, she was the first to notice the pattern and to alert local public health officials.
“After March of 2022, there was just a huge increase,” in brain abscesses, Bragg said. “I was seeing large numbers of cases and that’s unusual.”
“And the similarities in terms of the presentation of cases was striking,” Bragg said.
In almost every case, kids would get a common childhood complaint, such as an earache or a sinus infection, with a headache and fever, but within about a week, Bragg says, it would become clear that something more serious was going on.
After a presentation on the Nevada cases the Epidemic Intelligence Service Conference on Thursday, doctors from other parts of the country said they are seeing similar increases in brain abscesses in kids.
“We’re just impressed by the number of these that we’re seeing right now,” said Dr. Sunil Sood, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Northwell Health, a health system in New York. He estimates they are seeing at least twice as many as usual, though they haven’t done a formal count. He urged the CDC to continue investigating and work to get the word out.
Brain abscesses are not, by themselves, reportable conditions, meaning doctors aren’t required to alert public health departments when they have these cases.
They typically only come to the attention of public health officials when doctors notice increases and reach out.”
“In the Clark County cluster, roughly three-quarters of the cases were in boys, and most were around age 12.
Dr. Jessica Penney is the CDC Epidemic Intelligence Service officer, or “disease detective,” assigned to Southern Nevada Health District, the health department that investigated the cases. She presented her investigation of the Clark County cluster at the CDC’s annual Epidemic Intelligence Service conference on Thursday.
Penney says as they tried to figure out what was driving the increase, they looked at a slew of factors – travel, a history of Covid-19 infection, underlying health, any common activities or exposures – and they didn’t find anything that linked the cases.
Then, she says they decided to look back in time, looking for brain abscess cases in children under 18 all the way back to 2015.
“I felt like that helped us get a better sense of what might be contributing to it,” Penney said in an interview with CNN.
From 2015 to 2020, Penney says the number of cases of brain abscesses in Clark County was pretty stable at around four a year. In 2020, the number of brain abscesses in kids dipped, probably because of measures like social distancing, school closures, and masking – things that shut down the spread of all kinds of respiratory infections, not just Covid-19. In 2021, as restrictions began to lift, the number of these events returned back to normal levels, and then in 2022, a big spike.
A link to the pandemic?
“So the thoughts are, you know, maybe in that period where kids didn’t have these exposures, you’re not building the immunity that you would typically get previously, you know with these viral infections,” Penney said. “And so maybe on the other end when we you had these exposures without that immunity from the years prior, we saw a higher number of infections.””
Covid vaccines for children as young as 12 were approved for use by the FDA on May 10, 2021.
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