Infants falling seriously ill

Possible disease link investigated

MILAN/LONDON: Italian and British medical experts are investigating a possible link between the Covid19 pandemic and clusters of severe inflammatory disease among infants who are arriving in hospital with high fevers and swollen arteries.

Doctors in northern Italy, one of the world’s hardesthit areas during the pandemic, have reported extraordinarily large numbers of children under age 9 with severe cases of what appears to be Kawasaki disease, more common in parts of Asia.

In Britain, doctors have made similar observations, prompting Health Secretary Matt Hancock to tell a Covid19 news briefing yesterday he was ‘‘very worried’’ and medical authorities were looking at the issue closely.

Kawasaki disease, whose cause is unknown, often afflicts children aged under 5 and is associated with fever, rashes, swollen glands and, in severe cases, inflammation of arteries of the heart. There is some evidence individuals can inherit a predisposition to the disease, but the pattern is not clear.

English national medical director Stephen Powis told the British briefing he had become aware of reports of severely ill children with Kawasakilike symptoms in the past few days but stressed it was too early to determine if there was a link with Covid19.

‘‘I’ve asked the national clinical director for children and young people to look into this as a matter of urgency . . . We’re not sure at the moment,’’ Powis said.

In Italy, paediatricians are also alarmed.

A hospital in the northern town of Bergamo had seen more than 20 cases of severe vascular inflammation in the past month, six times as many as it would expect to see in a year, paediatric heart specialist Matteo Ciuffreda said.

Ciuffreda, of the Giovanni XXIII hospital, said only a few of the infants with vascular inflammation had tested positive for the new coronavirus, but paediatric cardiologists in Madrid and Lisbon had told him they had seen similar cases.

He has called on his colleagues to document every such case to determine if there was a correlation between Kawasaki disease and Covid19. He aimed to publish the results of the Italian research in a scientific journal.

Kawasaki disease was anecdotally linked 16 years ago to another known coronavirus, though it was never proven. The research was carried out after another, related coronavirus known as NL63 was found in a baby showing symptoms of Kawasaki disease in 2004.

Ian Jones, professor of virology at the University of Reading in Britain, said the NL63 virus used the same receptor as the new coronavirus to infect humans, but he also stressed it was too early to draw conclusions.

‘‘We just have to wait and see if this becomes a common observation,’’ he said.