E-mail updates
Follow on Twitter
Subscribe to RSSDoctors have struggled for decades to understand why thousands of children a year in the U.S. get Kawasaki disease, a rare condition that can cause serious heart damage if untreated, but is often mistaken for an everyday virus.
Now, a team of international scientists has announced the surprising finding that the answer may be blowing in the wind. The team’s leader, Dr. Jane C. Burns, professor of pediatrics and director of the Kawasaki Disease Research Center at the University of California San Diego, says cases of the disease are linked to large-scale wind currents whipping throughout Asia and around the North Pacific.
“We’ve always tried to find the cause of Kawasaki disease. There was this mysterious disease and nobody knew where it came from,” says Burns, also a pediatrician at Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego. “We realized that there was a very pronounced seasonality to it. As a pediatrician and scientist, that said to me there must be something related to climate, and we sought the help of climatologists.”
Researchers discovered the number of Kawasaki disease cases increased in Japan when the wind blew in a southwesterly direction, and were lower when winds shifted, blowing from the south. They also discovered the numbers of cases peaked from November to March when air from Central Asia blew over Japan and reached as far as Hawaii and San Diego.
Scientists still don’t know what’s in the air that might be causing the rise in cases. In March, the team sent up a research aircraft five or six miles above Japan, to collect air samples. The team is hoping to get funding to do additional research, including sending up many more aircraft to collect dust and analyze its genetic material for fungus, bacteria or viruses.
“We don’t know what’s in there; no one’s done this before,” Burns says. “But we’ll find out.”
Parents or pediatricians may not be as concerned about what’s in the samples as much as what Kawasaki disease looks like and what to do about it.
Story: How Facebook saved my son's life
The disease causes a prolonged fever, blood-shot eyes, red lips, red tongue, and also red, swollen hands and feet with peeling skin. Since early symptoms resemble those of the flu, it’s often misdiagnosed – and there isn’t a diagnostic test for it.
Last year, doctors were stumped by what was wrong with Deborah Copaken Kogan's son, Leo, who they initially thought had strep throat. When he was worse several days later, she posted a photo of him on Facebook and quickly heard from a friend who is a pediatrician and also a cousin who is a pediatric cardiologist. Both suspected Kawasaki disease. She rushed him to the hospital and he eventually recovered. She recounted her story on the TODAY show.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates 5,000 to 6,000 American children get the disease each year, most under the age of 5, although it has also been known to strike young adults.
While any child can come down with Kawasaki disease, Asians and African Americans seem to be most susceptible, followed by Hispanics and Caucasians, Burns said.
Treatment for the disease is a high intravenous dose of immunoglobulin, or antibodies, but 10 to 20 percent of children who get care still wind up with coronary artery damage. It’s fatal for about 1 in 10,000.
The key is for parents and doctors to recognize the signs, Burns says.
“Parents should seek medical attention and ask about Kawasaki disease if fever lasts beyond five days and is associated with rash, red eyes and lips.”
NBC News chief medical editor Dr. Nancy Snyderman speaks with mother and author Deborah Copaken Kogan about how Facebook helped in diagnosing Deborah's son with a rare disease, and aiding his survival.
Leave a Comment:
"The answer my friend is blowing in the wind, the answer is blowing in the wind."
We have reshurch On this type of air toxis mostly from the types of mold and mold last clay and dust. find that some the natural oil like peatry oil helpand they silk worm larva specail relationship with Serratia e15 microorganisms. Serrapeptase actually digests ( dissolves) non-living tissue, blood clots,cysts and arterial plague and all inflamed tissue. I have some reshurtch papers Ill will read up on it some more .1-931-268-2910 we can exschange note any outher infermatoin you have we mite be able to help you. Rod the Majestic Lion.
We have reshurch On this type of air toxis mostly from the types of mold and mold last clay and dust. find that some the natural oil like peatry oil helpand they silk worm larva specail relationship with Serratia e15 microorganisms. Serrapeptase actually digests ( dissolves) non-living tissue, blood clots,cysts and arterial plague and all inflamed tissue. I have some reshurtch papers Ill will read up on it some more .1-931-268-2910 we can exschange note any outher infermatoin you have we mite be able to help you. Rod the Majestic Lion.
Good gravy.
Why is this article bringing out crazy people who cannot spell?
Why would anyone take or want any medical advice from someone with such atrocious grammar and spelling?
Cassivella,
Just because someone has difficulty spelling, does not mean they are crazy. Just because their grammar may not be perfect, does not make them crazy.
Many brilliant people could neither spell nor construct a grammatically correct statement. If you look past the mistakes at the information that is provided, you might see that it is useful.
Please understand that if it truly came down to it, very few people are so perfect as to be able to spell every word they use correctly or be grammatically correct all of the time. Those that are that perfect are generally not writers, but copy-editors as it is their life's work to be "that perfect."
Even the studies written by doctors that are published in Medical Journals go through the editing process to correct the same types of mistakes that you cite.
And as a PharmD, you of all people should know that even MDs can't spell and their handwriting is atrocious at best. This does not negate the value of the information, it just makes it more difficult to decipher.
As a writer and a former CPhT with two children with learning disabilities, I will come to the defense of people with problems communicating.
When all major internet browsers have spell check (which also checks some grammar), then you have to accept that someone must not be very intelligent to post such horrifically misspelled posts.
It's offensive to the people who make even a moderate effort to expect us to read these posts.
People who are intelligent but have learning disability generally know that they should acquire help when they are communicating - either from spell check, by writing a post in Word first, or by asking for help from someone else.
In this thread, we have some guy posting his telephone number, probably wanting to sell you something, yet he cannot spell "research" or "might", and he signs his post "Rod the Majestic Lion".
If you don't think that is a sign of someone with a problem, then perhaps you should get looked at as well.
Kawasaki disease, regardless of its connection to southwesterly winds or as one person pointed out "steam cleaning" is hardly a joke. I would like to remind some of the people commenting on here.
In the fall of 1992 my son and I were spending a few weeks building houses for Habitat for Humanity in El Cajon, CA. It could have been a pretty nice time honestly but a young boy in neighborhood came down with a mysterious illness. As a few people mentioned I think it was initially misdiagnosed as "scarlet fever" or something like that but I sensed, with the red eyes and lips that it was something more serious. We were all very concerned for that young man.
I felt that way because my cousin Frank had scarlet fever as a child (he's a healthy television broadcaster now) and I remembered it was related to strep throat. Nothing like Kawasaki disease frankly. He took penicillin and ate pistachio ice cream and got better in no time.
Well, as you all remember we didn't have facebook back in 1992. All we had were gut instincts and common sense. Thank god someone had the common sense to drive that boy to a hospital some 400 miles away where they were able to diagnose him and treat him or else I fear for what may have happened to my own boy. I'm not sure if they were very proficient at treating Kawasaki's at all back then.
Honestly I don't remember which direction the wind was blowing or if the kid was Asian or Caucasian or what. But what I do remember was the fear of not knowing and seeing the the suffering of that little boy.
Are there more cases on the west coast than the east coast?
They use to call this pro-active virus, scarlet fever....which initiates itself through saliva left on handrails and multi-use desks of children in elementary school(how hester prim) and looks like strep throat....some fully unchecked developed fever infection leads to rheumatic fever which is simple a useful "term"for recognition that the virus settles in the heart valves and nodes and disrupts the sencronization of heart muscle stimulus.....globel winds only shrink our outdoor world into and indoor world...which is why the disaplines of daily hand washing, eating well and plenty of rest and recess helped to break the viruses hold. Our dairies in this country with the free lunch program have reduced the problem back to the home...where I would hold the practicle parent fully responsible to keep bed rest and fever reducers as the only weapon....anti-biotics here have created the immediate explosion of virus within the young immune system unable to stop the greater number moving through the blood. I will not allow certain transplants to take place at Loma Linda University Medical Center because of this latent virus within heart walls(old rheumatic fever scars) John 17:12
Wow. Hopefully, people realize how confused you are based on your spelling alone (which is quite possibly the worst I've seen - internet browsers all have spell check, you know) and your insistence in including a bible verse where it is not warranted nor wanted, but...
Scarlet fever is a disease caused by a toxin produced by a bacterium called Streptococcus pyogenes. You can diagnose it with a throat culture. Scarlet fever that progresses to rheumatic fever can cause inflammation of the heart muscle.
The disease spoken about in this article is an autoimmune disease that causes inflammation of blood vessels.
They are two completely different diseases.
Also, antibiotics do not degrade your immune system.
Perhaps you should keep your comments to the religious, non-scientific articles, as you don't have a clue about what you are talking.
Actually, antibiotics do suppress, (degrade? - weird choice of words), the immune system.
Seriously,
What you are thinking about is antibiotic resistance.
Bacteria can gradually become harder and harder to kill with the same antibiotic.
The only possible effect on the immune system from antibiotics on the immune system is not really an effect of the antibiotic - but, if you are ill, and you get over the infection faster, your body will not have as large of an immune response to your infection.
However, that does not mean your immune system is suppressed or the response is degraded.
If you never got that infection in the first place, you would never have a response anyway.
If you are taking an antibiotic that affects the GI flora, which could have a minor but limited affect, you can easily replace those bacteria with OTC supplements.
No I'm not.
Antibiotics kill bacteria, the good, the bad, and the ugly.
You have a lot of good bacteria in your body that are an important part of your immune system. Antibiotics kill that bacteria.
A partial solution is to take high quality probiotics AFTER you have finished all your antibiotic prescription. NOT while taking the antibiotics, as one idiot recommended to a friend of mine.
Scary stuff that an MD could be so ignorant as to deliberately load the body with bacteria while trying to kill bad bacteria with an antibiotic. That's a good example of why MDs in general scare the pee out of me. If they can't reason and extrapolate on the small stuff....
I'm not an MD, I'm a PharmD.
Taking probiotics is very helpful while taking antibiotics. All you need to do is space the probiotics 2 hours away from your antibiotic dose.
Taking probiotics while taking antibiotics helps prevent antibiotic-associated diarrhea that is common while taking beta-lactam/beta-lactamase inhibitor antibiotics such as Augmentin.
Additionally, taking probiotics during antibiotic treatment can help prevent yeast infections in both women and men.
After you finish your course of antibiotics, you simply continue with your probiotics for another week or so to make sure you recolonize your GI tract.
Good information, thanks.
And yet, I've never heard it for myself or family members from an MD. The best I've heard is "eat yogurt," if the issue is addressed at all.
But I don't really use antibiotics anymore. My typical infection is UTI, for which I use cantharis rather than antibiotics. I prefer to let my immune system do the work, since it knows how to do it properly. Besides, when I do get a UTI, I get those peeing-broken-glass symptoms, which I want to stop immediately, within the hour, not 2 or 3 days later.
Cassivella, I'm curious, if you've got a moment to educate me. :)
You say take the probiotics 2 hours away from the antibiotics. But a dose of antibiotics works for longer than 2 hours. Wouldn't that just result in making the dose work for less time before it is depleted? And wouldn't that reduce the effectiveness of the series, since the idea is to load up and keep the level high?
Thanks.
First of all, most antibiotics that people are taking for simple problems such as sinus infections (like plain penicillin or plain penicillin or a cepholosporin) are not going to significantly impact any GI flora.
When you take any antibiotic orally, you are going to get a big dumping, pulse dose about 40 minutes or so after you take the antibiotic. This is once your stomach has begun to digest the pill and the antibiotic is getting dumped into your blood stream.
When you take an antibiotic two or three times a day, the main effect of the antibiotic is happening during these dumping time. So, you are basically killing off bacteria, then you will kill fewer as your blood concentration goes down, then at a certain point you aren't killing many, then it is time for your next dose.
The time that the antibiotic is actually effective is called the "Area Under Curve (AUC)", and if you can imagine a good-old calculus graph, any non-extended release medication will start with a high spike that is the top of the arch, and then it will rapidly shoot downward until the slope looks like a double-diamond ski run.
The antibiotics you take also kind of have a "topical" affect in your GI system, prior to going through your blood stream. So, if you take an antibiotic and a probiotic at the same time, and if the probiotic is able to be killed by the antibiotic, the two will duke it out in your stomach and small intestine.
When you take your probiotic about 2-4 hours later, the antibiotic has mostly been digested and there isn't much of it running around inside your GI tract. You just have the lower concentration in your blood stream.
So, you will lose some probiotic because of the circulating antibiotic, but you won't have a total probiotic genocide if you space it out.
Some antibiotics, like Zithromax (azithromycin), are a once-a-day medication because their AUC is much longer. So, with that type of medication, you may take the antibiotic in the morning, then choose to take probiotics at dinner or before bedtime (or both).
Since most probiotic capsules, especially, have such large amounts of probiotic in them, it is more likely enough of them will survive to at least temporarily colonize your gut before you take the next antibiotic dose, thus reducing your yeast infection and diarrhea chances.
You are basically doing germ warfare, hoping to take enough probiotic to allow them to start reproducing without getting completely wiped out with the antibiotic doses.
Thank you very much for your time and effort in answering me, Cassivella.
Not a problem. I'm always happy to help, especially when people are open-minded and willing to discuss a differing viewpoint.
So, is this disease going to be renamed to "Kamikaze", which as folks who know a bit about Japanese history recognize as being the literal translation for "divine wind" and a reference to the typhoons that enabled the Japanese to repel Kublai Khan and the Mongol Invasion in the 13th century?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamikaze_%28typhoon%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_invasions_of_Japan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C5%ABjin
Renaming it to "Fūjin disease" might work better, except that the bad air probably originates in Guangdong province China and is connected directly to the local custom of enjoying entirely too many bowls of strange and bizarre "Happy Soup" featuring the ingrédient mystère de la journée, which can be anything from the entire animal and plant kingdoms, but typically involves ducks, pigs, and humans, as well as raccoon civets (a.k.a., "palm civets"), which were the "Happy Soup" mystery ingredient that spawned the SARS event of several years ago . . .
[SOURCE: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1609163 ]
[SOURCE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndrome#Cause ]
In the grand scheme of everything, Baldenario's advice to novices is that it is more prudent to focus on avoiding the yearly onslaught of the aftermath of the Red Chinese enjoying entirely too many bowls of strange and bizarre "Happy Soup" than on the current ice age, which for reference started approximately 2.5 million years ago and will continue so long as Antarctica and Greenland are covered with sheets of ice, since the reality according to the best estimates of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the mutants in Guangdong and their neighbors in Hong Kong and central China sicken millions of our citizens every year and kill approximately 35,000 to 50,000 of our citizens with influenza . . .
[SOURCE: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/rr5908a1.htm ]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_ice_age
To put this into perspective, more people in our great nation are killed each year in traffic accidents than by influenza, which in part is due to increased focus on enforcing seat belt laws . . .
http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s1103.pdf
Perhaps it is time to start focusing on the mandatory use of Kleenex® and Puffs® tissues when coughing and sneezing; providing and using N95/P95 protective masks when indicated; as well as encouraging at least some minimal level of basic personal hygiene and vastly increased inspections of imported beverages, foods, and any other products that the mutants in Guangdong province China et al. decide to use to attack us clandestinely, really . . .
Really! :-o
Lots of FUN! :(
Correction:
"more people are killed in traffic accidents" should be "FEWER people are killed in traffic accidents" . . .
And I need to drink more coffee, really . . .
Really! :-o
This was on this week's episode of House... caused the guy's skin to peel.
Curiously, Kawasaki's disease has also been associated with carpet "steam" cleaning, which uses a vacuum and water spray, not steam, to clean carpets.
Since southwest winds for Japan would come in over the Pacific ocean, perhaps the disease is caused by a water loving organism that becomes airborne in the form of a mist or spray. That would explain the connection with certain wind patterns coming in over oceans, and the connection with carpet cleaning.
I think they mean "Asians and Negroes seem to be most susceptible." The point being that people of certain races or of certain ancestry are susceptible, not people from particular continents nor of particular nationalities.
Yeah, but PC isn't concerned with meaning, remember?
My daughter had Kawasaki Disease when she was 4 years old. We are Caucasion and we live in Central United States. It caused her to have conjestive heart failure. She ran a fever of up to 105-106 for two days and we took her to the emergency room. The doctor on call diagnosed her with Slap Cheek Fever, because her cheeks had rashes on them. Another day goes by and we notice several different rashes showing up on her body. We took her to our PCP the following Tuesday (he was not in the office on Mondays) and he told us to get her to the University Hosptial because it might be Kawasaki Disease. Sure enough, it was. She was in ICU for a week and in so much pain. Her heart rate was twice the normal beats per minute. Her blood pressure was affected, she had a strawberry tongue, and we almost lost her. But she was a trooper and held in there!! I thank all the doctors and nurses who helped my daughter, and I give encouragement to all victims and victims' families to not give up!! My daughter just celebrated her 7th birthday, and she has not had any more health issues connected to Kawasaki Disease. Everytime I hear something in the news about Kawasaki Disease, I am all ears. Hopefully we can find a way to test for Kawasaki Disease so it can be diagnosed and treated quickly.
My daughter, now a healthy 26 year old, had Kawasaki Disease shortly before her 2nd birthday. It took our pediatrician 2 days to diagnose her worsening condition and he immediately thereafter sent us to our local Children's Hospital where we spent a frightening week. Thankfully she had no heart problems and returned to normal after a couple of months. Almost 25 years ago, and still there is so little known about the condition. Good to know that researchers are still working on it.
My daughter, now 29 yrs old, had Kawasaki when she was 4. She was sick at home for a week. I called the doc thinking she had the mumps, they said no bring her in. So in we went, was told it was a virus. Called them the next day as she was running a 103 fever, was told the same thing a virus. The next day she started vomiting, called them back and took her in, he said it was Streph throat and gave her a shot. No better the next 2 days so I called both days and was yet again told it was a virus, it would get worse before it got better. Sat. we noticed a rash on her chest and back, she was still vomiting and running a fever. We took her to the emergency room, where they admitted her imediately for dehydration. Within 1 hour her temp went from 103 to 106 where it stayed for several hours despite the nurses putting cool towels on her and a cooling sheet. They finally got it down to 103 where it stayed for 3 more days. Her Sed rate was 1000's higher than it should have been, her kidneys started shutting down, diharrea, sores in her mouth, and her hands and feet swelled up and started peeling. The doc finally said it was Kawasaki Disease, started her on high doses of antibiotics and very large doses of baby aspirin. Then sent us to Iowa City University Hospital, where they diagnosed the heart anuerysm. She eventually got better and came home. At the age of 25 she went back for her yearly cardio check-up and the anuerysm was gone!!!!!!!! She is a normal happy adult with no side affects from any of it.
Hmmm, rates increase when seasonal winds from Central Asia pick up?
Wonder if there's any possible connection to the destruction of the Aral Sea ecosystem and the toxic crud the wind routinely picks up from that region.
Cassivella, I completely agree with you about spelling and grammar. I can't take people seriously with that many mistakes.
If we were talking about parenting or Jonas Brothers or something like that, I wouldn't even bother.
But, we are talking about medical information that can either save or take lives.
And, I guess I was right that some people are not dissuaded by people with poor spelling and grammar - even when it comes to their children's lives!
At least someone agrees with me! LOL
I was diagnosed with AKD at age two and have several CAE/CAA's (The actual diagnosis changes every so often) as a result. I am only 14, which may have something to do with my confusion; but I felt this article seem to be more based on speculation than something that can possibly be proved. Any one else feel that way????