By ALEX GREIG
PUBLISHED: 23:56 EST, 23 February 2014
A mysterious illness doctors are comparing to polio has struck down up to 25 children in California, leaving them with paralyzed limbs and a bad prognosis.
Medical experts have identified the illness in Californian children over the course of a year.
The children, aged between two and 16, all suffered paralysis of the arms or legs and some experienced respiratory difficulties.
All the children had been vaccinated against polio.
Polio once paralyzed up to 20,000 people a year in the U.S. until the vaccine was introduced in 1955.
‘What’s we’re seeing now is bad. The best case scenario is complete loss of one limb, the worst is all four limbs, with respiratory insufficiency as well. It’s like the old polio,’ Keith Van Haren, a pediatric neurologist at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital in Palo Alto, California, told USA Today.
The first known case appeared in 2012 when two-year-old Sofia Jarvis was admitted to hospital with breathing problems.
Her mother, Jessica Tomei, 37, told the Mail Online that her daughter Sofia began wheezing and vomiting and was rushed to hospital.
She spent four days in hospital after being diagnosed with asthma and was discharged. Tomei knew something else was wrong.
The toddler had full use of her left arm when she left the hospital but 24 hours later at a follow-up appointment, Tomei noticed the girl wasn’t moving her left arm.
She was taken for an MRI scan but neurologists couldn’t work out what caused her paralysis.
‘I will never forget his face, when he came out to tell me the findings of the MRI,’ Tomei says of the radiologist who read Sofia’s MRI scan.
‘He actually took her images to a pediatric neuroradiology conference to gather more opinions.’
Sofia has undergone intense physical and occupational therapy to restore function to her arm, but nothing helped.
She had surgery nerve transplant in April 2013 but Tomei says the family may have to wait a further two-and-a-half years before they know if it was effective.
Right now, Sofia’s arm is completely flaccid and her muscles are shriveled from lack of use.
‘Sofia was completely healthy one day and paralyzed the next week,’ says Tomei.
She can’t think of anything that could have caused her daughter’s sudden serious illness, except a virus that went around her sons’ school.
Now four, Sofia improved little after her illness and now has a paralyzed left arm, weakness in her left leg and some breathing problems. Otherwise, she is a happy, healthy pre-schooler, and Tomei is grateful the mystery illness wasn’t worse.
‘We know we are lucky that the virus did not affect other areas of her spine as that may have caused paralysis of her legs or worse, all four limbs,’ she says.
‘As we were leaving the doctor’s office, I noticed that she went to grab something with her left arm and she stopped, midway,’ Tomei told USA Today.
Van Haren and other California neurologists searched recent medical files and found that there were more cases.