I'm Flora Lichtenen, and you're listening to Science Friday.

A mysterious disease has been showing up in emergency rooms.

Doctors have been seeing it for about a decade, and there have been fewer than 800 confirmed cases.

But it's what they've been seeing that's raised concerns.

Otherwise, healthy children showing up,

unable to move their arms and legs, and in some cases eventually becoming completely paralyzed.

The disease is called acute flaccid myelitis, or AFM. And if the symptoms sound a lot like polio,

that's because the virus that causes AFM is a cousin of the polio virus.

Journalist and physician Eli Kahan has been following the path of this disease for us and is here to tell us what doctors are seeing, what researchers are doing to find a vaccine, and what this new polio might tell us about our preparedness for future disease outbreaks and pandemics.

Eli, welcome back to Science Friday.

Thanks for having me, Flora.

Eli, you spend a lot of your time in emergency rooms.

What can you tell us about the disease?

What do physicians know about it?

Yeah, I mean, this is a disease that if we rewind the clock back to 2014,

it really stumped doctors and researchers alike. Here you had a swath of children coming in,

and their manifestation of disease looked a lot like polio, which is something that certainly one generation,

at least multiple generations of doctors, possibly, thanks to vaccines, had not seen. And so here

you had a number of kids coming in. They were limp. They couldn't move their arms or legs. They

couldn't lift their heads off the tables.

And all the tests that doctors were running were coming back negative, meaning we were sending

off all these swabs and blood tests and urine samples and samples of CSF, cerebral spinal fluid, which baths the brain.

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