On Sunday, my colleague Dr. Seema Yasmin and I wrote about the outbreak of enterovirus D68 in the United States. The virus typically causes a common cold, but in rare cases children have been hospitalized with breathing problems. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are also investigating a possible link between EV-D68 and an unexplained neurologic illness that has affected 17 children since August.
Some readers have asked if the outbreak of enterovirus D68 in the United States could be linked with the recent influx of child migrants from Central America. There’s no evidence that that’s the case.
Researchers first isolated EV-D68 in California in 1962 and have reported clusters of illness in Japan, France, Italy, the Philippines, the Netherlands and Thailand in recent years.
A 2013 study in Virology Journal found only “low numbers” of EV-D68 among 3,375 young patients with flu-like illness in Latin America, including El Salvador and Nicaragua. Enteroviruses as a group, including coxsackie virus and variants that are more common than D68, accounted for 3 percent of total samples. Rhinoviruses, another set of common cold-causing viruses, were far more prevalent.
“There is no evidence that EV-D68 infections are more common in Central or South America than in this country,” wrote Rafal Tokarz, a researcher at the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health in an email. “There is no scientific evidence that the strain or strains currently circulating in the US originated there.”