A Bellingham, Washington, boy died at the age of six from an illness that looks like polio, walks like polio and talks like polio – but it isn’t polio, and some doctors are puzzled, particularly because he’s not the only child fatality in recent months.
Others, however, say the illness is tied to illegal immigration, and point to research that shows ties between the rise in undocumented border crossings and the advent of a curious virus that mirrors polio and has been hitting children hard across the country.
But first, the current news angle.
As CBS News reports:
“Daniel Ramirez [age 6] was rushed to Seattle Children’s Hospital last month with an unknown virus that caused his brain to swell. According to a GoFundMe page set up by his family, he was put into a medically induced coma, which doctors hoped would help his brain heal.
“But on Monday morning, his family announced that Daniel lost his battle to the virus.”
His family posted news of his death via Facebook.
The family wrote: “It saddens us to announce that Daniel passed away on Sunday, October 30, 2016, surrounded by his family. Daniel was an amazingly sweet little boy, who could put a smile on anyone’s face. He had a personality that made him loved by everyone who ever met him. Daniel was taken from us too soon, but his memory will live on, and he will never be forgotten. Rest In Peace Sweet Daniel!”
Daniel’s just the latest to be affected by the illness.
Seven other children in Washington state alone have died from this mysterious virus that causes uncontrollable brain-swelling. And dozens more across the country have suffered similar fates, due to the same virus that’s leaving the medical community shaking its head.
CBS Seattle affiliate KIRO reported state and federal health officials are looking at Daniel’s death as due to a rare condition called acute flaccid myelitis, or AFM, that causes paralysis. And AFM cases are on the rise in children in the United States.
As the CDC reported: This year along, 89 people in 33 states have been confirmed as having AFM. In 2015, the number of cases in the country was 68. Most are children.
Federal and state health officials are continuing to look for causes.
But some see a link with illegal immigration.
Look at this headline from Natural News, that reads, “Enterovirus D68 linked to illegal immigration is behind fatal polio-like illness killing American children.”
That’s from January on this year, as written by Ethan A. Huff.
“A strange virus that began to spread rapidly after multiple waves of illegal immigrant children were shipped into the U.S. from Latin America last year has been shown in a new study to be directly related to the “polio-like illness” that’s reportedly infected at least 112 children in 34 states, and killed nearly a dozen others.
“Known as enterovirus D68, or EV-D68, the mystery virus picked up speed dramatically last fall, with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reporting that the number of new cases reported in 2014 was significantly higher than in any previous recorded year. And now, researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, (UCSF) have found the genetic signature of this enterovirus in patients diagnosed with a related illness known as acute flaccid myelitis (AFM).
“After looking at every other possible factor that could have triggered AFM in the patients studied, the team verified that EV-D68 was, in fact, the cause of every case of AFM. A relatively new strain of EV-D68 known as B1, it turns out, which emerged about four years ago, was found to be the trigger of AFM, manifesting symptoms similar to the polio virus and another closely related nerve-damaging virus known as EV-D70.”
Investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson has weighed in on the matter in the past, as well, pointing to the fact that the CDC, the supposed go-to source of information about diseases and their root causes, has been largely waffly on the reasons for EV-D68.
Between mid-2014 and January 2015, for instance, more than 1,100 cases of EV-D68 were confirmed in 49 states and the District of Columbia, almost all in children.
But on that, Atkisson said: “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.”
