BACKGROUND Vogt-Koyanagi-Harada (VKH) disease is characterized by bilateral granulomatous uveitis with neurologic, auditory, and dermatologic manifestations. However, acute myelitis complicating VKH disease has rarely been reported. CASE REPORT A 50-year-old Chinese Han woman presented with difficulty walking, numbness on the left side of the body, and difficulty with urination. The patient w...

This paper reviews the current knowledge about Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS). GBS is defined as an acute, areflexic, flaccid paralysis, which is classified into 4 subgroups: acute inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (AIDP), acute motor-sensory axonal neuropathy (AMSAN), acute motor axonal neuropathy (AMAN) and Miller-Fisher syndrome (MFS). AIDP is associated in 30-50% of cases with crania...

West Nile virus (WNV) is one of the leading causes of insect-borne encephalitis and acute flaccid paralysis in the US. Acute flaccid paralysis is a potentially serious illness, which manifests itself as a Guillain-Barré-like syndrome with generalized weakness and shortness of breath. We report a case involving a patient who presented with acute flaccid paralysis due to WNV infection and was suc...

BACKGROUND Neuromyelitis optica (NMO) IgG is a specific marker for NMO. Furthermore, a high proportion of patients with longitudinally extensive transverse myelitis (characterized by spinal cord lesions extending 3 vertebral segments or more on magnetic resonance imaging) are seropositive for NMO-IgG and are considered to have a limited form of NMO. The NMO-IgG status in mild cases of acute par...

In 2014, the United States experienced an epidemic of acute flaccid myelitis (AFM) cases in children coincident with a nationwide outbreak of enterovirus D68 (EV-D68) respiratory disease. Up to half of the 2014 AFM patients had EV-D68 RNA detected by RT-PCR in their respiratory secretions, although EV-D68 was only detected in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) from one 2014 AFM patient. Given previously...

Acute flaccid paralysis is the main clinical manifestation of poliomyelitis. Faecal specimens from cases of acute flaccid paralysis in Australia are referred to the National Poliovirus Reference Laboratory for virus culture to determine if poliovirus is the causative agent. Isolations of poliovirus are tested to determine whether they have characteristics of the Sabin oral polio vaccine virus s...