Is a Common Virus Suddenly Causing Liver Failure in Kids?

Last October, a young girl with severe and unusual liver failure was admitted to a hospital in Birmingham, Alabama. Her symptoms were typical: skin and eyes yellow with jaundice, markers of liver damage off the charts. But she tested negative for all the usual suspects behind liver disease. Her only positive test was, surprisingly, for adenovirus—a common virus best known for causing mild colds, pink eye, or stomach flu. In rare cases, it’s linked to hepatitis, or inflammation of the liver, in immunocompromised patients. But this girl had been healthy.

Then it happened again. A second kid came in, about the same age, with all the same symptoms, and again positive for adenovirus. “One patient is a fluke; two is a pattern,” says Markus Buchfellner, a pediatric-infectious-disease doctor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). Two quickly became three and then four. Alarmed, the hospital’s doctors alerted local health authorities and the CDC, whose investigation ultimately of unusual hepatitis in kids in Alabama. Two needed liver transplants.