acute disseminated encephalomyelitis

Both of the newly reported individuals were unvaccinated.

One of those deaths involved an unvaccinated 18-year-old in Mifflin County who developed acute disseminated encephalomyelitis, or ADEM, a rare and severe neurological complication of measles involving inflammation of the brain and spinal cord.

The other was an unvaccinated adult in Jefferson County.

I'm deliberately using Pennsylvania's term measles-associated deaths because the state uses a specific epidemiological case definition to determine whether a death is associated with measles, and the circumstances of these four deaths haven't all been identical.

So- Yeah, it's definitely on the list, but it's not typical, is it? Uh, what other things were sort of thought about with this kind of bore multifocal process?

I think given the, uh, yeah, the multifocal process, they considered, uh, ADEM, uh, so acute demyelinating encephalomyelitis, and they also considered sarcoidosis as well.

And then, um, I think they eventually did start her on steroids, and they found that she had, um, a really good response to the steroids, um, and made a really good neurological recovery.

And over the next few months, she then has, um, some ataxic relapses.

And so they attracted patients coming from all over the world.

And as a result of that, ba-da-boom, ba-da-boom, We had people with NMO and ADEM who were becoming members of our community very rapidly.

Why? Because their doctors were telling them that they had the inflammatory attack in their spinal cord, which they were calling transverse myelitis.

And I describe this in my book.

What sense did that make? It didn't make any sense at all.

But what he was telling us was true.

very much related to why people with ADEM and NMO were being sent to us because the inflammatory attack in the spinal cord was being called transverse myelitis.

So these people thought they had NMO in transverse myelitis or they had ADEM in transverse myelitis.