‘Super antigens’ tied to mysterious COVID-19 syndrome in children
A serious pediatric illness has been linked to a similar condition in adults. Coronavirus inhabiting the gut could be the cause—and it may explain long-lasting symptoms, too.
Count the U.S. children who have caught COVID-19 since February, and you’d soon outnumber the population of Boston.
Fortunately, most of these 697,000 confirmed or probable cases have had comparatively mild illness—and somewhere between 16 and 45 percent of children may not manifest any symptoms at all. Yet some in this group—clinically defined as those under the age of 21—go on to develop a serious condition called multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children, or MIS-C.
Thanks to months of urgent research, what began as a mysterious spectrum of symptoms has coalesced into a definable illness, with early signs that include fever, rashes, abdominal pain, diarrhea, and vomiting. Though MIS-C is rare—with 1,027 confirmed cases in the U.S.
