LOWELL, Ind. — An Indiana mother is using her grief to warn other parents about a bacterial infection that killed her son within hours.
“This is not your typical everyday flu,” said Ashlee Dahlberg of Haemophilus influenzae, also known as “H. flu” or “Hib.”
Doctors say it’s a bacterium – not a virus – and it’s extremely deadly. Most children are vaccinated against it when they’re babies.
“We later found out that he contracted invasive Hib, which is the more aggressive form of Hib,” Dahlberg said.
Dahlberg said it all started when her 8-year-old son, Liam, came home from school with a headache in April. By the next morning, he was being rushed to the hospital. Her normally lively child became delirious at some moments.
“They took him to an MRI. That’s when they discovered the amount of bacteria that was covering his brain and spinal cord. Basically at that point in time, there was nothing they could do,” Dahlberg said.
Their lives changed in the blink of an eye.
“I would never wish this kind of pain on my worst enemy ever. It’s hard. To have sat there and listened to the doctors say, ‘You did everything right, there’s just nothing we could do,’ to lay there with him as they took him off life support, I can feel his little heartbeat fade away — there’s no words that can describe that pain.”
Dr. Eric Yancy is all too familiar with H. flu.
“All the way up to the mid-’70s and early 1980s, it was absolutely devastating. If it didn’t kill the children within a very short period of time, it left many of them with significant complications,” Yancy said.
Complications, Yancy said, pretty much ended when the vaccine was created in 1985. Dahlberg said Liam was vaccinated, but Yancy said the boy most likely contracted H. flu from an unvaccinated person, maybe even another child.
“We pretty much had it under control, and we pretty much didn’t see that many cases of it. Over the last few years, the immunization rates have continued to fall,” Yancy said.
Now, Dahlberg is urging parents to make sure their children are all properly vaccinated.
“I feel like I have failed my child because I could not protect him from everything that would cause harm,” Dahlberg said.