In a tragic and deeply concerning turn of events surrounding a measles outbreak in Texas, Children’s Health Defense (CHD) revealed the truth about a child’s tragic death at a Lubbock, Texas hospital.  Journalists not only failed to properly investigate the case, but instead engaged in fear-mongering and speculation, resulting in a narrative contrary to the facts of her death.

Most news outlets reported that the child died from measles or complications associated with the viral illness.  These same media outlets further speculated that the girl’s death was due to the fact that she “was not vaccinated,” with particular emphasis placed on her Mennonite background, Mennonites being a community allegedly known for being “under-immunized or partially immunized.”

One example of such reporting came from NBC News.  Rather than conducting an in-depth investigation, NBC News reported that the 6-year-old girl was the first child to “die of measles in two decades,” framing her death as a consequence of the “anti-vaccine movement ... turning the girl and her family into propaganda, an emotional plank in the misguided argument that vaccines are more dangerous than the illnesses they prevent.”

To help allay fears and clarify the situation, the parents of the deceased child granted CHD access to their daughter’s medical records.  These documents revealed that although the child had contracted measles, the disease itself was not the cause of her death.  Renowned physician Pierre Kory, M.D. examined the documents, putting to bed the widely reported cause of death.

In a March 19 CHD interview with CHD.TV host Polly Tommey, Dr. Kory, along with other medical experts Brian Hooker and Ben Edwards, provided a significantly different account, calling out a series of catastrophic failures by the hospital’s medical team.  Medical error has been recognized as one of the leading causes of death in the U.S.

Kory lamented that the media’s portrayal of the girl’s death as an inevitable consequence of the measles virus is not only misleading, but also overlooks the critical role that medical mismanagement played in this case.  Rather, it was the failure to recognize and treat the secondary infection that led to the child’s rapid decline, something that could have been avoided had the medical team followed established guidelines for treating complications associated with viral illnesses.

The child’s worsening condition was primarily due to a “grievous” medical error.  Kory found that the hospital failed to administer the appropriate antibiotics at the correct time, allowing an untreated infection to spiral into shock, ultimately leading to the child’s death.

In his interview, Dr. Kory outlined the series of events that led to the tragic outcome:

I’ve done medical case reviews for malpractice lawyers for a good part of my career and this case was tragic — and really had nothing, I shouldn’t say nothing to do with measles, but she did not die of measles by any stretch of the imagination.  In fact, she died of pneumonia.  But it gets worse than that, because she died of a medical error, and that error was a completely inappropriate antibiotic.  It was an insufficient antibiotic.

Dr. Kory further explained that the child died of mycoplasma, a common organism found in community-acquired infections.  He expressed his frustration, stating:

Mycoplasma is extremely common, and this case is infuriating because the child died from receiving an inappropriate antibiotic.  It’s in every guideline for infectious disease that for a hospitalized patient, you need to administer two antibiotics — one from the beta-lactam class (like penicillin or cephalosporins), which they did correctly, but you must also pair it with an antibiotic from a different class, such as a macrolide or quinolone.  They did neither of these things.

Kory continued:

And the tragedy is that mycoplasma is an organism that doesn’t have a cell wall.  Penicillins and cephalosporins work by disrupting the organism’s cell wall.  But if you don’t have a cell wall, you need a different mechanistic antibiotic, which is azithromycin, which interrupts the protein synthesis and messes with the formation of proteins in the ribosome. ... You put them on two antibiotics to cover all the possibilities.

The hospital also allegedly failed to follow some of the required standards for treatment with antibiotics, a failure that led to complications and death.  Kory continued,

When I order that antibiotic, that antibiotic has standards.  It should arrive within at least two hours, and from my review of the records, the antibiotic was ordered at approximately 11:00 P.M., and as far as I can tell, it was not administered until 9:00 A.M. the next morning.  It was actually written to start the next day.

So not only did you have several days’ delay of decline without the appropriate antibiotic, but then when they realized that they were missing the appropriate antibiotic, it took them, as far as I can tell, 10 hours to administer it.  And by that time, she was already on a ventilator.  And approximately 24 hours later, actually less than 24 hours later, she died rather catastrophically because she was declining.

“She was in a state of shock.” Kory added, “and she needed medicines to maintain her blood pressure.  Suddenly her blood pressure crashed, and she arrested.  That kind of suddenness in an infection suggests some other cardiac event.  In a child like that, with that amount of inflammation, infection, and disturbances in the bloodstream, I can only surmise that she died of a catastrophic pulmonary embolism.  But by the time that happened, there’s not a lot you can do.”

Brian Hooker, CHD’s chief scientific officer, also reviewed the records, confirming Kory’s findings.  He shared the following timeline of the girl’s tragic death:

We know that the little girl that passed away, she actually was recovering from the measles.  Her measles rash was fading.  She had seen a pediatrician beforehand who gave her cough syrup and recommended Tylenol.  But after the rash was fading, she was having problems with a cough and was breathing.

Then the parents took her into the E.R.  They took her into the E.R. on a Saturday night and saw a resident there who gave the little girl antibiotics.  About two and a half days later, she was not progressing, she was getting worse, and she ended up in ICU, and then, about 36 hours later, then she died.

Image via Pixnio.