Health officials are warning of an unusual spike in rare and serious brain abscesses in children in Nevada, with some suggesting weakened immune systems from COVID lockdowns are a possible factor.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the number of brain abscesses in minors tripled in Nevada last year from an average of four or 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.
Because Bragg’s profession is so rare, with her being the only pediatric neurosurgeon in the state, she was one of the first to notice a pattern in increased brain abscesses.
“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 more experts in other parts of America have also noticed these rare cases.
From CNN:
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.
Some physicians are citing “immunity debt” as a contributing factor to the rise in brain abscesses and other infections, which they suggest could have been brought about by the COVID lockdowns.
“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,” said CDC Epidemic Intelligence Service officer Dr. Jessica Penney.
“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.”
Doctors have recently seen unusual increases in a number of serious childhood infections, such as invasive group A strep. Some think that during the years of the pandemic, because children weren’t exposed to the number of viruses and bacteria they might normally encounter, it left their immune systems less able to fight off infections.
Sood said he’s not sold on the theory that there’s some kind of immunity debt at work. Instead, he thinks Covid-19 temporarily displaced other infections for a while, essentially crowding others out. Now, as Covid-19 cases have fallen, he thinks other childhood infections are roaring back – he points to unprecedented surge in RSV cases last fall and winter as an example.
The consequences of the lockdowns appear to continue to this day years after they were lifted, which is just another reason why the American people should never let them happen again.
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