Licensed Texas Physician with significant experience successfully treating measles during the current outbreak is reporting a second tragic death of a chronically ill child who had been previously infected with measles in a Texas hospital. Similar to the recent unfortunate death widely but incorrectly reported as primarily caused by measles rather than complicated by measles, this is again a case of a child suffering from pre-existing conditions who was misdiagnosed, and it appears that she may have been improperly medically managed.

In this second case, a young girl who had previously been infected but recovered from a measles infection developed a blood infection (sepsis) after suffering from chronic tonsillitis complicated by chronic mononucleosis. Infectious mononucleosis (IM, mono), also known as glandular fever, is an infection usually caused by the Epstein–Barr virus (EBV). There is no vaccine for EBV, and in most cases children that develop this common infection recover with supportive care. In this case, although she had developed and recovered from measles, the girl had been ill for months with chronic mononucleosis complicated by chronic tonsillitis, and her parents had been arranging for her to have her tonsils removed, a procedure known as a tonsillectomy.

Unfortunately, the child developed sepsis, a bacterial blood infection, which progressed to acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). In this case, blood cultures identified gram-positive cocci in her blood, indicating that her sepsis and ARDS were likely caused by either a Staphylococcus aureus or Streptococcus pneumoniae bacterial infection.

Her parents brought her to the Texas University Medical Center in Lubbock, Texas for treatment of her apparent bacterial sepsis due to underlying chronic tonsillitis and chronic mononucleosis. At the time of admission, the girl’s father specifically requested that she be treated with inhaled budesonide by nebulizer. The UMC Hospital staff refused this request, and appeared to have treated her as if she was suffering from Covid rather than ARDS, and administered an intravascular infusion of steroids. IV steroids suppress the immune system’s ability to fight bacterial infections, and the father was aware that inhaled Budesonide is an effective, lower-risk treatment relative to IV steroids when treating ARDS…..

Medical error is the third leading cause of death in the U.S., according to a 2016 analysis by Johns Hopkins University researchers, including Dr. Marty Makary, the recently confirmed Commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.