Articles labeled: disease

A 5-year-old girl has a disease that is so rare, only 200 people in the world have been diagnosed with it. It’s called Leukodystrophy, a “congenital hypomyelination”, and it’s a neurological disease that actually attacks the white matter in the brain.

This makes it difficult for Lexi [Drumm]’s brain to communicate with other parts of her body, Drumm told the newspaper.

Lexi was born healthy and could even walk and talk up until she was 14-months-old. That’s when she had a seizure and “everything deteriorated from then on,” Drumm said.

Now the disease has started attacking white matter on Lexi’s brain stem and she is unable to move her head and eyes. She can still control her smile.

“I could be in the worst mood possible, and that little smile can still perk me up,” Drumm said.

Finn McConnell, a 15-month-old baby in Puyallup, Washington, has a very rare form of cancer, Opsoclonus Myoclonus Syndrome, which causes antibodies to mistake the brain for a cancerous tumor creating a situation where one’s “own body [attacks the] brain.”

Last December, Finn’s mother took him to the hospital after he began to act funny.

“We had noticed that he had stopped talking. He was having more difficulty crawling. His balance was off and he would wake up absolutely just screaming, probably five to six times a night,” said mother Theresa McConnell.

She thought he had an ear infection. But the doctor’s diagnosis was much more grim than she ever imagined.

“He says ‘I think he has a tumor in the brain,’” she said. “Of course our hearts just drop. You don’t want to get that kind of news.”

Finn was admitted to the hospital for a series of tests.

An MRI revealed that Finn’s tumor was not in his brain, but in his chest.

This is dedicated to all the parents that think vaccinations are nothing more than a government conspiracy theory to line the pockets of big corporations…

On Jan. 25, the 7-year-old’s parents took the youngster to the Children’s Clinic of La Jolla. The child may have coughed and sneezed in the office, thus infecting four other children.

Those four patients returned to the clinic between Feb. 5 and 8, possibly spreading the virus to 60 other children.

All of the 11 confirmed patients, from 10 months to 9 years old, were not vaccinated either because they were younger than 1 – the minimum age for measles inoculation – or because their parents objected to having them vaccinated, county officials said.