I often hear emotional personal stories whenever there is a discussion about vaccines.
Last week I heard one that especially hit close to home.
Emily Lastinger was just 3 1/2 years old when she got the flu, like millions of other kids each flu season. She began to get sick on a Wednesday, saw her pediatrician the next day and was treated with an anti-viral flu medication, and was up and down with her symptoms for the rest of the week - typical influenza.
What is not typical, fortunately, is that she got a lot worse and didn't make it to her recheck appointment with her pediatrician on Monday. Instead, her mother found her unresponsive on her bed that morning. Her father administered CPR until the ambulance arrived. She died later that night in the ICU of a local Children's Hospital. Emily didn't survive influenza.
It was especially heartbreaking to hear how Emily's parents had to tell her two older brothers that their healthy little sister had died. How hard is it to need to grieve, but also need to stay strong for your other kids?
While any story of a child dying from a vaccine preventable disease is certainly tragic, Emily's story especially touched me as my daughter Emmie is about the same age now as Emily was in 2004 when she got the flu. Emmie also has older brothers who would be devastated if she got sick like Emily.
Emmie is also fortunate that flu vaccine recommendations have changed since 2004, so that they are now recommended for everyone who is at least six months old. In 2004, when Emily got sick, flu shots were only formally recommended for children and adults in high risk groups. They were encouraged for healthy children between the ages of 6 and 23 months, but that didn't become a formal recommendation until the next year, and the recommendation that would have covered Emily, flu vaccines for all children between the ages of 24 and 59 months, was still another three years away.
Emily's parents have been working to educate parents about how serious the flu can be and how even healthy children sometimes do not survive influenza. Their efforts help parents understand the importance of following the latest recommendations to get all children who are at least 6 months old vaccinated against the flu each year.
But kids still die each year from influenza.
So that we don't have to take the risk of losing our children and having their lives cut short by a vaccine-preventable disease, Emily's mother has a simple message for us - "please vaccinate your children and yourself this and every flu season. It could save the life of someone you love."
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Dr. Iannelli, Thank you for sharing Emily’s story. As a mother of 5 this story really hit home to me as well. Two years ago my 10 year old suffered with H1N1. It was so unsettling to know that people were dying from this flu virus and although she recovered, we were all concerned that she could become another tragic story of a child lost to influenza. Unfortunately, even last year over 100 children died from seasonal influenza, so although the vaccine recommendations have changed in the past two years, we still have work to do. Hopefully, as Emily’s parents and various organizations (like Every Child By TWo and Families Fighting Flu) work to raise awareness of the importance of flu vaccination, I pray that more people will realize that immunizations can protect themselves, their families, their loved ones and their communities from influenza. Again, thank you for sharing this story.