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October 15, 2015 is a date that is seared in Kathleen Brady Stimpert’s memory forever. That was the day her Harry Potter-obsessed 5-year-old son, Sawyer, completely changed. “I came home from work and found Sawyer in the bathroom,” she says. “My parents were in town, and he wouldn’t let anyone touch him; he kept scrubbing his arms and legs, saying, ‘I feel like there are germs all over me.'”

All three of Kerry Henrikson’s children were diagnosed with pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorders associated with streptococcus — better known as PANDAS — leading to frequent hospital visits and prescriptions for drugs that didn’t seem to work. Symptoms of the disease often look common enough to be diagnosed as mental health conditions like obsessive-compulsive disorder, or infections like strep throat. Unsurprisingly, treatment for those more-common conditions do not help children suffering from PANDAS.

Only after a Chatham doctor diagnosed Henrikson’s children with the disease did the mother begin to see a change.

Henrikson’s story is known around Sarnia. Soon it will be known by people around the world thanks to the UK-based Liftoff Global Network, a virtual film festival hosting Stolen Childhood and others on their site from Jan. 14 to Jan. 20

New research from Johns Hopkins Medicine and Sheppard Pratt Health System shows that people in the study with schizophrenia also have higher levels of antibodies against the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), a herpes virus that causes infectious mononucleosis, so-called mono.