

Polio-Like Disease Appears in California Children - ghshephard
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2014/02/25/us/ap-us-polio-like-illness.html?hp

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bertil
The BBC paper yesterday was trying to reassure people, I believe, precisely to
avoid reactions like the three comments below. Comparing this to large
epidemics is biased: you have forgotten the dozens of potential similar
threats. Instead, you consider expert metrics, say, virality (which appears
low).

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k-mcgrady
Link to yesterdays discussion on this (although it was a BBC article not NYT):
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7289467](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7289467)

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kevcampb
Seeing this article, I can't help having horrible feelings of reading the
following.

[http://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/03/us/rare-cancer-seen-
in-41-...](http://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/03/us/rare-cancer-seen-
in-41-homosexuals.html)

Chilling, in context.

Lets hope it's nothing nearly as serious.

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CWuestefeld
Given the observation "something medically bad is happening to kids", how to
scientists get to the conclusion, "this is caused by virus xyz"?

I'm really curious what the roadmap for the research looks like. Because it
seems to me that the potential search space -- all the things that could
potentially cause problems -- is mind-bogglingly huge. And any given victim of
the illness is likely to have some quirks - history of exposure to various
stuff, family history of different diseases, an odd bacterium or two in the
gut, etc.

How does it all get sorted out?

~~~
Fomite
You look into things known to cause symptoms like these - enteroviruses in
this case - and test for known versions in the patients. You send samples to
labs to look for new, unknown viruses. You take pretty exhaustive biological
and social histories from the patients, and look for commonalities - shared
exposures, other underlying conditions, etc.

~~~
CWuestefeld
I've got a handle on all that stuff with looking for commonality. But how does
one look for new, unknown viruses? I don't think you can just grow them in
petri dishes like bacteria.

~~~
bertil
Viruses don't exist out of the blue: they often use common and well-known
envelope to carry genetic information. These are easy to isolate: that's the
reason why they are classified and described as entemo-viruses, retro-viruses,
etc. That's also why it took a while to find HIV.

The Wikepedia you link you probably want to look at is:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymerase_chain_reaction](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymerase_chain_reaction)
(Source: MD girlfriend).

~~~
twic
The advent of PCR and complete sequences of large numbers of viral genomes
makes this sort of analysis fairly easy, although far from foolproof, these
days.

Before the era of molecular biology, isolating the agents of disease was
considerably more painstaking. There's an outline of the isolation of the
polio virus here:

[http://www.virology.ws/2008/12/19/100th-anniversary-of-
the-i...](http://www.virology.ws/2008/12/19/100th-anniversary-of-the-
isolation-of-poliovirus/)

But even once that was done, all scientists had was a procedure to make a
test-tube full of liquid which would give you polio. They could reasonably
surmise it was a virus (and they were lucky it wasn't a prion!), but beyond
that, they knew nothing: not the nature of the virus, not how to culture it,
not how to fight it. Gleaning that knowledge meant putting their lab coats
back on and going back to the bench for a few more decades.

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digikata
This link provides a bit better technical coverage and context

[http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-
perspective/2014/02/puzzling-...](http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-
perspective/2014/02/puzzling-polio-illness-reported-5-california-children)

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yangtheman
I just saw this on 11PM news on TV. This sounds serious, since it seems like
there is no cure at this point and they have no idea the cause or how this is
being spread. This needs more coverage.

~~~
ronaldx
If you're looking for infotainment, there are plenty of other rare diseases
and disabilities that also deserve coverage. Example that comes to mind:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nodding_disease](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nodding_disease)

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mariuolo
At first I feared it was a consequence of vaccination controversies. This is
even worse.

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peter_l_downs
Well, that's not good.

