by Rebecca Grapevine
Fewer than 10 children in Georgia have been diagnosed with pediatric hepatitis, State Epidemiologist Cherie L. Drenzek said at the state Board of Public Health’s (DPH) monthly meeting Tuesday.
The pediatric hepatitis outbreak began in Alabama in October 2021. So, far 245 children in the United States have had the mysterious disease. Most needed to be hospitalized and nine have died.
It’s unclear what causes the disease. None of the children diagnosed so far had hepatitis viruses, but 45 percent did test positive for adenovirus type 41, a common childhood infection that is usually mild and causes gastrointestinal upset. The disease remains very rare.
Monkeypox
Two Georgians have been diagnosed with monkeypox, Drenzek said. The Department of Public Health confirmed the first Georgia case earlier this month.
Drenzek said most of the approximately 65 known monkeypox cases in the United States have been among adult males between 23 and 76 years old, with a median age of 38.
The cases appear to have been transmitted through very close personal contact with someone else who had the lesions, Drenzek said.
Often the monkeypox infections have been found in people also infected with chlamydia, HPV, or syphilis and many of the people with the disease identify themselves as men who have sex with men, Drenzek said.
Most of the people with diagnosed cases had traveled recently – but not to the western and central African regions where monkeypox is endemic
COVID-19
Reported COVID-19 numbers in Georgia have increased about 20 percent in the last week. Hospitalization and death numbers have also increased slightly, Drenzek said.
Those numbers are likely an undercount because many people are testing at home and not reporting the results to public health agencies, she added.
Drenzek said the rates of infection in what she called the “sixth wave” of the virus are nowhere near what they were during the height of the pandemic.