Individuals may suffer from high levels of fatigue, muscle or heart weakness, diabetes, strokes, or vision and hearing loss.

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It is not known why the virus specifically attacks the heart muscle or why young children are particularly at risk of serious infection.

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Post-mortem examination often reveals subtle, but nonetheless fatal, flaws in the heart muscle or kidneys of these animals the sorts of changes that are hard to predict and therefore almost impossible to prevent.

ECONOMIST: Cloning around

Instead, new medical devices allow valves to be fixed or replaced with tiny catheters that are snaked up from the groin, similar to the way stents are implanted in the heart to open clogged arteries when people have heart attacks or pain from a lack of good circulation in the heart muscle.

FORBES: New Heart Valves Prove We're Living In The Future

Anesthesiologists paralyze patients undergoing sensitive surgeries on the spine, brain or heart by bathing cellular receptors with strong muscle relaxants.

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They give the heart muscle time to rest or recover and can support the failing heart until a donor heart becomes available for transplantation.

BBC: Image of heart failure

For sensitive operations like spine, heart or brain surgery, doctors don't just put patients to sleep, they temporarily paralyze them with powerful muscle relaxants.

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