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IT SEEMED so unremarkable at first, something only a mother would notice.

Instead of running to the sink like most middle schoolers and washing his hands as fast as he could, 13-year-old Connor Odom would wash, rewash and then wash his hands again. His mother, Lucia Odom, thought it was odd, but didn’t really worry until, over time, she saw his hands — red, chaffed and nearly raw up to his wrists.

Then, it was the showers. Ten minutes turned into 20. Twenty minutes turned into an hour. An hour became three hours. Connor wouldn’t, couldn’t, get out of the shower even though the hot water would always run out.

“It was almost like he had these glazed-over eyes, like he was present but not present,” Lucia remembered. “I knew it wasn’t normal.”

Xander, 9, of McCall, has loved snowboarding and skiing since he was 2 years old, but his ability to enjoy them changed abruptly in December 2014, when he began suffering from tics, or spasms, accompanied by anxiety, mood swings, learning regression and night terrors.

The disorder, called Pediatric Acute-onset Neuropsychiatric Syndrome, causes the immune system to attack the brain in response to various underlying infections like strep, Lyme disease and staph.

There’s was probably one kid in your class who always got strep throat. It seemed like they were out every few months like clockwork, often for days at a time. Maybe you were that kid. Immunologists have known about this phenomenon for a long time—some children are just prone to getting strep repeatedly. But until recently, they had no idea why.

In 2014 John Cryan, a professor at University College Cork in Ireland, attended a meeting in California about Alzheimer’s disease. He wasn’t an expert on dementia. Instead, he studied the microbiome, the trillions of microbes inside the healthy human body.

Dr. Cryan and other scientists were beginning to find hints that these microbes could influence the brain and behavior. Perhaps, he told the scientific gathering, the microbiome has a role in the development of Alzheimer’s disease.

The idea was not well received. “I’ve never given a talk to so many people who didn’t believe what I was saying,” Dr. Cryan recalled.

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