re: Four year old Iowa girl who didnt get flu shot now blind

quote:

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Without the flu or with an immune system already prepped to defend against the flu she would not have had febrile seizures.

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You can’t be serious. Kids can have seizures secondary to lots of febrile illnesses. The fever doesn’t even have to be that high; a modest increase in body temp can cause a seizure if the rise occurs very quickly. The vast majority of time they’re harmless, and they’d have to be exceptionally severe and long-lasting to cause brain damage.

So maybe in this case there were febrile seizures triggered by the flu, but that’s strictly incidental. Not that you can fairly conclude that from this shitty article, though, since it doesn’t actually offer any causal mechanism to explain why this little girl ended up blind, or even specify that she had lab-confirmed influenza.