Weather in the News
Re: Weather in the News
A Doctor’s Lifelong Quest to Solve One of Pediatric Medicine’s Greatest Mysteries
For 40 years, Dr. Jane Burns has been working to find the cause of Kawasaki disease, an illness
that can lead to aneurysms and heart attacks. Her work has brought together a most unlikely team.
For 40 years, Dr. Jane Burns has been working to find the cause of Kawasaki disease, an illness
that can lead to aneurysms and heart attacks. Her work has brought together a most unlikely team.
By 2000, a student of Dr. Burns’s noticed that Kawasaki disease cases in San Diego climbed whenever it rained. Dr. Burns partnered with Dr. Cayan, the climatologist, and Japanese researchers to discover that cases in Japan rose and fell with seasonal rhythms and that, in contrast to what is seen with person-to-person outbreaks, the case levels were always oddly consistent across broad swaths of the country.
Later, she and colleagues including a European climate scientist, Xavier Rodó, analyzed records of more than 247,000 patients in Japan to discover that the biggest outbreaks of the disease had something peculiar in common: They had all occurred when large-scale wind currents were blowing in from Central Asia. When those winds reached Hawaii and California, cases climbed there, too.