12-Year-Old Misdiagnosed With Flu Later Dies From Septic Shock

12-year-old Alyssa Alcaraz went to an Urgent Care after throwing up and falling ill at school. The doctors at the Urgent Care diagnosed Alcaraz with a flu. She was given cough syrup and nausea medications and sent on her way.

“She’s been sick before with a cold and flu that has lasted longer,” Lino told Fox News. “It was nothing new for us. Like any normal teen, she just wanted to be left alone on her phone.”

Throughout the following week, Alcaraz continued on a downward spiral with her symptoms. She lost her appetite and began to have trouble breathing. Her family provided her with lots of water but began to realize something more was going on, so they took her back to the Urgent Care. Doctors detected that her oxygen levels were indeed, low, so they rushed her to Visalia, California’s Kaweah Delta Medical Center.

“The doctor wanted to rule out meningitis, though she wasn’t complaining about her neck, he didn’t want to rule it,” Lino explained. “We were starting to do that procedure to test her fluid when she coded.”

She later went into cardiac arrest. The heart attack was a result of septic shock, which was in turn, a symptom of undiagnosed strep. Her family had no idea that Alcaraz was suffering from strep, they’d been acting under the idea that she was fighting symptoms of flu.

“A couple days after she passed, we got a call from the lab at the funeral home,” Lino said. “We were shocked by it. Doctors said it was the flu, but it was a bacteria infection due to strep that shut down [her] organs all within three days.”

Yesterday, a perfectly healthy bodybuilder was similarly diagnosed with flu and ended up dying from septic shock (organ failure). In this case, the doctors have maintained flu as the cause.

Are doctors now just over-inflating flu numbers through reprehensible misdiagnosing?

“We want to do something on her behalf and make a change in some way,” Lino said. “It’s not fair. We know it’s not fair. We don’t want revenge. We want changes. We want something positive out of this.”