2-year-old Jeremiah Cox from Indiana felt unwell on September 29, 2018.
After he had a fever and began to vomit, his parents urgently brought their son to the Indianapolis hospital.
Soon after hospitalization, the entire body of the child was covered with purple spots that looked like bruises and doctors were at a dead end, not understanding what disease they were dealing with.
Then septic shock began and the child's body was covered with a purple rash. Doctors diagnosed Jeremiah with hemorrhagic vasculitis (increased bleeding due to damage to blood vessels and internal organs), but its cause was still unknown.
According to doctors at Riley Hospital for Children, the child's condition is caused by a mysterious bacterial infection.
The child was injected with powerful antibiotics, which worked, but it was too late. Blood flow to the limbs was blocked and tissue dying began.
To stop the process, the boy had to amputate both arms at the elbow and leg above the knee.
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From the excitement and anxiety of Jeremiah's mother Ashley Cox, who was pregnant in her last term, contractions began and she was taken to the hospital, where her baby was safely born. In total, the Cox family, along with the new baby, has four children.
Now Ashley is retiring from childbirth and is still very worried about her sick son. She cannot believe what happened to him and considers it crazy.
2-year-old Jeremiah is still in intensive care. His life is not in danger now, but he will have to start from scratch and adapt to life with prostheses. While he cannot even crawl and is under the round-the-clock supervision of nurses.
The doctors told the boy's parents that they might never find out what exactly struck him.
This horrific case of a strange infection occurred during an epidemic of a mysterious polio-like disease we wrote about earlier. This disease has paralyzed the legs and arms of children in the United States for several years now, and doctors still cannot understand how it spreads and how to deal with it.
Outbreaks of this disease, called acute flaccid myelitis, occur annually in different states and that increase and then fade. 2018 became the year with one of the highest number of cases. To date, 72 children have been officially hospitalized in 22 states with acute flaccid myelitis, and another 83 are under suspicion.
This disease is dangerous primarily because there is no definite cure for it. A child with paralyzed legs or arms can only be helped by long-term therapy and it is not a fact that it will be successful.
