May 4, 2022 — Three children in Indonesia have died of acute hepatitis, bringing to four the global death toll in the mysterious worldwide outbreak of the liver disease, CBS News reported.
The Indonesian Health Ministry said three children died last month in hospitals in Jakarta, the nation’s capital, after displaying symptoms such as nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, fever, jaundice, convulsions, and loss of consciousness, CBS News reported.
The Indonesian Health Ministry, like other health authorities around the world, says it doesn’t know what caused the children to get hepatitis.
“At the moment, the Health Ministry is investigating the cause of the acute hepatitis by running a full panel of virus tests,” it said.
The World Health Organization has identified almost 200 cases of acute hepatitis in children in 16 countries, mostly the United Kingdom and the United States. Seventeen children have required liver transplants.
In the United States, there were 20 cases in Alabama, Delaware, Illinois, New York, and North Carolina. One infant died in Wisconsin.
Severe hepatitis with acute liver failure is rare in healthy children. While no cause has been determined for most of the cases, many of them have been linked to a strain of adenovirus, a common cold virus that usually doesn’t cause hepatitis in healthy children.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a nationwide alert, encouraging doctors to look for symptoms of pediatric hepatitis that could be linked to the cold virus. The CDC recommended that doctors consider adenovirus testing in children with hepatitis when the cause is unknown.
