/Dissecting The Vaping Illness Mystery

Dissecting The Vaping Illness Mystery


Dissecting

The Vaping

Illness Mystery

MILWAUKEE – It was June 11 when a teenager showed up at Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin short of breath. He had lost a lot of weight, was fatigued and couldn’t do routine activities.

A chest X-ray showed something doctors found odd: interstitial pneumonia. Unlike the more common viral or bacterial pneumonia that infects one or two of the lungs’ five lobes, interstitial pneumonia looks like a complex spider web crisscrossing the entire lung.

“It’s usually associated with a bad disease,” said Michael Meyer, medical director of the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit.

Describing for the first time how they helped uncover that vaping may be behind hundreds of serious lung injuries and as many as six deaths across the country, Meyer and a team of doctors at Children’s say it was a hospital-wide effort – and specialized training in working with teens – that led to the discovery.

The doctor said it didn’t make sense for a previously healthy teen to quickly develop this kind of illness. They pulled in specialists from across the hospital: pulmonology, infectious disease, pathology, immunology, and even oncology. They did a CT scan and a lung biopsy.

“We thought, ‘Do we have cancer here?’ ” Meyer said.

They launched what amounted to a broad-ranging medical investigation as doctors throughout the hospital scrambled to find a cause – and a treatment.

All tests came back negative. It was a mystery.

About two weeks later, another teen arrived. The X-ray looked similar.

And then came another. It was the July Fourth weekend.

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Meyer said he clearly remembers the moment Lynn D’Andrea, the hospital’s medical director of pulmonary services, warned him they may be dealing with an outbreak of some kind.

“I was on call. Dr. D’Andrea was on pulmonology. She came out of the operating room, and she said ‘This is the third one. This is weird. There’s something else going on. We have to start figuring this out,’ ” Meyer said.

Two more patients were admitted that same weekend.

“The third, fourth and fifth teens all came within two days of each other,” D’Andrea said. They all showed “significant injury,” she said.

“That specific injury is very rare. I had seen it probably once in 25 years, and so three in a week – it’s like, this has to be something different,” D’Andrea said. “And there was this common thread of vaping.”



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