In October 2009, Serese Marotta’s 5-year-old son Joseph came down with a cough and had a hard time breathing. Doctors at the nearby urgent care clinic in Springboro, Ohio, sent Joseph to the children’s hospital, where he was treated for fever and breathing problems over several days.
Nine days after falling ill, Joseph suddenly lost consciousness and his heart gave out. Doctors could not revive him.
It turned out that Joseph had contracted H1N1 influenza, a strain of flu circulating that year. His autopsy showed the virus had caused his intestines to rupture.
Marotta was shocked that the flu could kill a child. “When you lose a child to flu, I think a lot of people thought the same thing I did,” Marotta said. “How come I never heard of this happening? I can’t be the only one.”
Finding other flu families
Searching for answers and emotional support, Marotta discovered a group called Families Fighting Flu, a national organization of dozens of other families that had lost relatives to the flu, mostly young children.
Today, Marotta is the chief operating officer of the group, whose goal is to educate people about the flu and the importance of the annual vaccine. Marotta’s son Joseph did get a flu shot, but he wasn’t protected because the H1N1 strain wasn’t included in the seasonal vaccine he received. It takes about six months to produce large quantities of a flu vaccine, and the H1N1 strain was detected after the vaccines had gone into production the previous spring.
Pediatric deaths from the flu are relatively rare. In the last decade, the number of children killed by the flu has ranged from 37 during the 2011-12 season to 288 in 2009-10, during an H1N1 influenza outbreak. The flu and complications from it mostly strike the elderly and frail, and have caused between 12,000 and 56,000 deaths in the U.S. each year since 2010. But in that same period, between 7,000 and 26,000 children under five were hospitalized each year for flu-related reasons.
READ MORE AT: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/these-families-lost-kids-to-the-flu-now-theyre-fighting-for-flu-prevention