My Take on LeRoy's Mystery Illness - A Pathogen, not Environment

The images are staggering.  Fifteen normal high school students in LeRoy, NY suddenly developed Tourette's Syndrome-like symptoms, including tics, vocalizations and uncontrolled body movements. While details are few, the story was finally picked up by major news outlets and now is being widely heard.

The good news is that the whack-job / Oprah / conspiracy media didn't get a hold of this one yet.  Some of the best minds and whistle-blowers are on this, and they all are approaching this with a range of plausible hypotheses.

So what is the cause?

When you read the blogs and the news, it is clear that everyone is Monday-morning quarterbacking this one, so I will too. Of course, this is speculation, but I can provide a rationale for my hypothesis.

The speculation is ranging- some plausible, others not so hot. Luckily the nut opinions have been in the minority. People have blamed vaccines, stress, attention seeking, GMO wheat, gas wells at school to a 1970 train wreck where 45K gallons of tricholoroethylene was dumped into the soil.  Erin Brokovich has been dispatched to check environmental concerns and this hypothesis seems to be the center of media attention.  I don't buy it at this point.

This poster shows the old  trend of blaming everything,

 along with apparently some tinkering the government 

has done to the human gene pool.  The clueless love to speculate.

From what I read, I'm going with PANDAs, Pediatric Autoimmune Neurological Disorder Associated with Strep. You can read about it at the CDC website. While not a perfect fit with the symptom spectrum, the fast onset, neurological presentation and clustering in that particular age/location cohort suggest that this is a pathogen and not an environmental cause.

If not PANDAs in its classical form, it is likely to be something highly related.

I'm not sold on the environmental cause.  If that were the case I think we'd see an increasing rate in the number of cases reported.  These seem to follow a common time course.  Exposure among kids would be markedly different as would their sensitivities, so it is hard to reconcile a cluster of sudden presentation.  Still, worth checking.

If I were on this case I'd be sequencing whatever genes I could identify in their sera, eliminate the human genes from consideration, and look at the cross section of critters that remain.  I'm guessing that they'll find evidence of strep.

My heart goes out to these girls and their families.  I'm glad that sober voices have prevailed, that real physicians have been mobilized and I suspect progress will be seen in a week's time.  However, watch for the anti-vaxers, the anti-GMO crowd, UFO kooks and others to get hot on this case as evidence of big pharma / big ag influence.  I hope Drs. Oz, Weil and Mercola are banned from interacting with these kids-- as they need real medical care for a sad mystery illness.