It is a rare and serious syndrome which has affected several children in France and Great Britain and which is perhaps linked to the coronavirus. Among the main symptoms: abdominal pain, gastrointestinal disorders and cardiac inflammation.
This disease looks like Kawasaki’s disease, a vascular syndrome affecting young children. This is at least what the British and French health authorities have noted who try to establish a link between the coronavirus and this disease affecting children.
For the time being, only a few children are affected but these cases worry at the highest point for several reasons. First, the appearance of this serious disease in children could be linked to the coronavirus pandemic. Doctors seek to establish this link between this syndrome and the coronavirus, said Matt Hancock, the British Minister of Health.
“It is a new disease which, in our view, can be caused by the coronavirus,” he said on LBC radio. “We are not 100% sure because some of the people who contracted it have not been tested positive (in the coronavirus). So we are currently doing a lot of research. But that’s something that concerns us, “he added.
“This is a very rare disease, but I think it is completely plausible that this is due to this virus, at least in some cases,” said the head of health services, Chris Whitty, during the government’s daily press conference on the coronavirus.
These interventions follow an alert from the English public health service, NHS England, concerning a small increase in the number of cases of seriously sick children, some affected by COVID-19, others not.
Same observation on the French side, where Doctor Isabelle Kone Paut, professor of pediatric rheumatology at Kremlin-Bicêtre hospital in Paris has reported “calls for resuscitators for a month for children who have a picture of severe myocarditis and who have in addition signs of Kawasaki’s disease, some of them have been tested positive for COVID-19”.
“Nothing makes it possible to establish today a link between Kawasaki’s disease and COVID-19 but we note that children tested positive for COVID-19 develop symptoms that correspond to those of Kawasaki disease as unstable tension and myocarditis for serious forms,” adds Alexandre Belot, researcher at Inserm.
