Strange condition puts football team in hospital
12 Oregon high school football players are suffering from a mysterious muscle disorder and doctors and school officials are now trying to find out which is the strange disease that got them in the hospital last week.Three of them had to undergo surgery for compartment syndrome, an affection that is causing swelling muscles to compress by the fascia and causes them to begin to deteriorate and emit toxins into the blood. The more lucky ones were treated with intravenous hydration to get the toxins out of their blood. Willamette Valley Medical Center CEO Rosemari Davis says that the doctors are doing tests to find out what is the cause of the disorder but have not found anything yet. The McMinnville High School football players have been training the whole summer but began immersion camp only last Monday. On Tuesday evening the first athlete was already complaining that his hands didn’t feel normal and that he was not able to bend his elbows. Three more football players from the team began complaining of the same symptoms on Wednesday, and by Friday a 12 of them were hospitalized with the same problems.
Doctors did blood tests for toxins, and observed that the normal level of CK readings jumped for most of them from 200 to 2,000 and noticed that the three which needed surgery to release the swelling of their muscles had readings of over 40,000. All the team members which accused problems had readings of between 3,000 and 40,000. McMinnville Schools Superintendent Maryalice Russell declared on a news conference that it was not the type of workouts the players were doing through the camp that caused the problems, and the football players too do not believe that it is anything related to the type of practice that they were doing. Some of the football players gave interview saying that they were amazed on how fast their condition was getting worse and say that they reached the hospital only hours later from noticing the first symptom.
Compartment syndrome is usually linked to Creatine, a substance commonly found in the supplements that the sportsmen are taking, but the players denied having taken any. Davis said that there was no evidence that any of the players used supplements, but the final Creatine tests will only come out in a few days. The mystery is not solved yet, but Russell declared that the team will practice again on Monday at the start of the regular season, because they all considered that the first workouts, which were going to consist from pushups and tricep dips will affect the football players’ condition. The parents are not blaming Jeff Kearin , the football team’s coach, or the workout schedule for their kids’ problems and say that the exercises are the usual ones performed by football player teams during practice. Many of them believe that the condition is coming from a combination of facts that can not be yet explained. One of the athletes had already been released from the hospital, and the others expect to be out soon.11
