Yes influenza is a common viral infection for the majority of adolescent and adult people, it can be serious and cause death in children, the elderly, and the medically fragile. Jade Philips, a 4-year-old child living in Iowa, USA, almost died, as reported CNN.
Complication of influenza had reached his brain
The child had not been vaccinated this year, and contracted the flu a few days before Christmas. While the drugs regulated the fever she suffered from, there were no signs alerting her parents to possible complications. On New Years Eve, she was hot and unconscious: her parents called the emergency room, and the little girl was taken by helicopter to the Iowa Pediatric University Hospital.
Doctors then discovered encephalopathy, a complication of the flu that affects the brain and causes brain damage, then a few days later, an extremely rare type of encephalopathy, ADANE syndrome, or acute necrotizing encephalopathy.
“The doctors said she had significant brain damage. It is said that our child may never wake up, and that if she did, she might never be the same,” says her mother to CNN.
Child woke up, but may have lost his sight
Against all expectations, Jade woke up on January 1, and her condition did not stop improving. She was able to do without respiratory assistance, sit, eat, talk … But her eyesight did not return, as shown in the video of CNN. If the little girl’s eyes are in perfect health, according to an ophthalmologist, it is the part of her brain affected by vision which could have suffered brain damage caused by the flu.
“We don’t know if she will recover the vision” explains to CNN Czech, the neurologist who followed Jade. “In three or six months, we will know. Whatever its recovery in six months, it will not progress after this course,” he adds. The child may also have cognitive and developmental problems in the future.
Jade and his family were able to return home on January 9, and were financially supported by a kitty opened by their neighbor. The parents of the child, marked by this ordeal, decided to inform as many other parents as possible of the peculiarities of the flu vaccine. Jade had been vaccinated in March 2019, but the flu virus changes every year and the vaccine must therefore be renewed each season, between the end of the summer and the end of October.
If the vaccine is not an airtight barrier against influenza, it significantly reduces the risk of complications for children who contract it. This season, 32 children have died from the flu in the United States, according to CNN.
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