Two dramatically different clinical scenarios of neonatal Echovirus-11 infection in late preterm male twins: a case report and review of the literature.

Abstract

Background: Enterovirus is a well-known cause of infection in all age groups, with particular importance for neonates with both vertically and horizontally transmission. Neonatal clinical manifestations are highly variable and mostly is asymptomatic, but severe infections are described such as myocarditis, meningitis, encephalitis, hepatitis, coagulopathy, pneumonia and viral sepsis. Since 2022, The World Health Organization has recently reported an increasing number of severe neonatal infection associated with a new variant of Echovirus-11 (E-11). Many of the infants described with E-11 infections in a case reports series were preterm, male and twins. Despite the criticality of neonatal disease, the clinical management remains primarily supportive and therapeutic options are unfortunately few.

Case presentation: We present the case of male dichorionic diamniotic late-preterm twins, born in December 2023 at Filippo del Ponte Hospital in Varese (Northen Italy) with early Echovirus-11 infection. They had two dramatically different clinical scenarios and one of them developed a severe and fatal hemorrhage-hepatitis syndrome.

Conclusions: Our experience has the purpose to emphasize public health attention to Echovirus-11 neonatal infections and their rare dramatically neonatal clinical presentations. Prematurity, host genetic predisposition and vertical transmission seem to be strong risk factors for severe infections, but it still need to be elucidated. According to previous Italian report, a surveillance protocols in all cases with unexpected clinical presentations and sequencing complete genome in order to better understand typing and molecular characterization of emerging and re-emerging pathogenic variants and new strains are strongly recommend in Italy.