The writer is a science commentator
If three-quarters of your liver were removed, it would grow back to its full size in about a year. The extraordinary resilience of our largest internal organ raises the possibility that the rare and severe hepatitis (liver inflammation) that is affecting children across the world might be causing a wider, undetected wave of milder liver damage.
That is one takeaway of a technical briefing published on Friday by the UK’s Health Security Agency. “I suspect that these catastrophic cases are likely to be accompanied by mild and moderate cases that are going almost unnoticed,” agrees Zania Stamataki, a senior researcher in liver immunology at Birmingham university.