A mysterious surge of hepatitis in children may be down to long periods of harsh anti-COVID lockdown, one UK government expert has suggested.
A number of western nations have seen a mysterious outbreak of hepatitis in children with no understood link to any known hepatitis virus, which one government expert is now suggesting may be the result of COVID clampdown locked-away children having weaker immune systems.
Hepatitis — or the inflation of the liver — can be the result of a variety of causes, including a number of viruses.
However, this mysterious outbreak of the disease — which has afflicted over 100 children in the UK so far, leading to one death and ten needing liver transplants — has yet to be explained despite children being afflicted with the illness in Europe, the United States and Israel.
According to a report by The Telegraph, Dr Meera Chand of the UK Health Security Agency, who has been investigating the outbreak, has suggested that children may in fact be suffering from a relatively normal adenovirus, but are now more susceptible to harsher symptoms due to the long periods of harsh Chinese Coronavirus restrictions.
Dr Chand reportedly suspects “a susceptibility factor” to the breakout among children during their “formative stages”, saying that a “lack of prior exposure” to the outside world could be the cause of their serious affliction with whatever is causing the disease.
Adenoviruses had become less prevalent during the worst periods of the COVID pandemic — while people were encouraged avoid and even ordered to isolate from the wider world — but have since returned to prominence once again, with other medics fearing that a mutation may have led to the creation of a more deadly pathogen causing the outbreak.
Other experts suggest that a child’s prior infection with COVID-19 may also be a contributing factor to their hepatitis diagnosis.
While it ultimately remains unknown whether the locking down of children during the pandemic is the ultimate or partial cause of this hepatitis outbreak, what seems much clearer is that the effect of lockdowns on children across the world has been devastating.
Multiple studies have now found that the educational and social development of children has been stunted by pandemic measures, with one UK report finding that some children even regressed in their development while cut off from their ordinary lives.
The UK government study noted “that the pandemic has continued to affect young children’s communication and language development, with many providers noticing delays in speech and language” adding that: “Others said babies have struggled to respond to basic facial expressions, which may be due to reduced social interaction during the pandemic”.
“There continues to be an impact on children’s physical development, including delays in babies learning to crawl and walk,” it continued. “Some providers reported that children had regressed in their independence and self-care skills.”
Meanwhile, studies in Germany and the United States have found that keeping kids out of schools has had serious detrimental effects on reading ability, with fourth-graders in Germany on average being nowhere near as proficient in the essential skill as their pre-pandemic counterparts.
More bizarre effects of the lockdown have also been noted by care providers, with one UK nursery saying that children had begun to speak in the accents of the cartoons they watched while locked up at home.
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