“We’re trying to get across to clinicians that if you see a child with limb weakness, in the right season, do an MRI of their spine or a lumbar puncture, in consultation with a neurological specialist,” says Messacar.
Diagnostic delays have confounded the search for the disease’s cause. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention hasn’t been able to detect the most probable culprit—EVD-68—in the bodily fluids of every patient. But, as I’ve reported before, that might be because doctors are collecting the wrong fluids, or because they’re collecting fluids too late, at a time when the consequences of infection linger but the virus itself has disappeared. If wary clinicians can collect a slew of tissue samples—spinal fluid, nasal swabs, stool, and more—when patients first arrive in their offices, rather than days or weeks later, it might become much easier to confirm what’s behind AFM.
Faster diagnoses would also be a huge boon to parents, many of whom have been bounced from one provider to another before their paralyzed children are properly diagnosed and treated. “We still don’t know if those delays were medically relevant,” says Bove, “but they were very relevant in terms of the parents’ trust in the system.”
Read: How misinfodemics spread disease
That trust can also falter when it comes to decisions about treatments. Some families have faced a kind of weary resignation from their physicians: “Their kids have spinal injuries, and they’ll get back what they get back,” says Bove. But early and frequent rehabilitative therapies have, in some cases, made a big difference. Luca, for example, is back in school; he can run around with his friends, even though his arms and neck are still weak. Others haven’t been so lucky, and full recoveries are still uncommon. But Bove says that most children have made gains of some kind, and continue to do so over years. “The message should be one of cautious hope,” she says.
This year has also been a unifying one for scientists and clinicians who have dealt with AFM. In September, Carlos Pardo-Villamizar from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine convened a working group of medical colleagues, and they now run weekly conference calls to discuss the disease. They’re putting plans in place for which tissue samples to collect, creating guidelines for treating patients, and readying clinical trials to work out which treatments work best. When the next wave hits in 2020, if not earlier, they’ll be ready.
The CDC has also convened an AFM task force with similar goals (and some of the same participants). To support the agency’s efforts, Kirsten Gillibrand, the Democratic senator from New York, has asked Congress to approve a substantial amount of emergency funding—just as it did for the Zika virus in 2017.
“No parent would say that AFM is more important than all the other conditions that children face,” says Bove. “Sickle cell and type 1 diabetes affect even more children. But the fear is that AFM could get bigger, which is why parents want more attention now. Before polio affected tens of thousands of kids, it affected hundreds.”