Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

I'm Joshua Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement,

and a former health commissioner here in Baltimore.

Our goal is to bring evidence and experience to illuminate critical public health issues.

If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health question at jhh.edu.

That's public health question at jh.hu.edu for future podcast episodes.

Hi, I'm Lindsay Smith-Rogers, producer of public health on call.

Today, Stephanie Desmond talks with Dr. Catherine Smith, a pediatric transplant

hepatologist at Johns Hopkins, about mysterious cases of hepatitis that are appearing in

young children.

They discuss why it's happening now

and whether we're seeing a new illness or just something we found more of because we're looking

for it. Let's listen. Catherine Smith, thanks so much for joining me. Thank you for having me.

So today I wanted to talk about these unexplained hepatitis cases we've seen in young children.

Could you lay out the issue for us? So there was a cluster of kids that were noted to have acute,

severe hepatitis. And I think in the United States, the first cluster was in Alabama. And so it was put on the

radar of the CDC, the original thought that it was related to adenovirus. So that's how

everything started. And so where are we today? So today the CDC has sort of an initiative to investigate the causes of these episodes.

The data that they have now is retrospective, some of it, all the way back to October.

So, you know, we have to interpret numbers in that setting.

Right now, we know that most states, there are a few states that haven't seen any cases,

but most states in the U.S. have had some

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