An Indiana boy died hours after he complained of only mild symptoms that ended up being a rare and fatal bacterial infection, his grieving mother revealed.
Liam Dahlberg, 8, came home from school complaining of a headache in April, but it wasn’t until the following morning that his mom, Ashlee Dahlberg, realized something was wrong with her usually lively and upbeat son, she told 13WMAZ.
She rushed Liam to the hospital, where doctors diagnosed him with the extremely deadly Haemophilus influenzae type b, also known as “H. flu” or “Hib.”
Hib is a bacterial infection — not a virus — that most children are vaccinated against as babies, but even so, it’s still possible to contract it, especially at younger and much older ages.
“Anybody that contracts it usually dies within 24 hours,” the heartbroken mother said.
An MRI showed that the infection had spread and was covering the 8-year-old’s brain and spinal cord.
“Basically, at that point in time, there was nothing they could do,” Dahlberg revealed.
Liam died less than 24 hours after complaining of a headache.
“I would never wish this kind of pain on my worst enemy ever. It’s hard,” Dahlberg cried as she painstakingly spoke about losing her son in the blink of an eye.
“To have sat there and listened to the doctors say, ‘You did everything right, there’s just nothing we could do,’ to lay there with him as they took him off life support, I can feel his little heartbeat fade away — there’s no words that can describe that pain.”
Hib infections can be “invasive,” or rather spread to parts of the body that are typically free from germs, according to the Cleveland Clinic.
The infection is usually spread through respiratory droplets and can remain dormant in the noses and throats of healthy people.
However, a weakened immune system or individuals already suffering from viral infections can allow Hib to enter the bloodstream, giving the bacteria a pathway to spread to the host’s organs.
Dr. Eric Yancy, a pediatrician in Indianapolis familiar with the deadly bacterial infection, told 13WMAZ that up until vaccines for Hib were introduced in 1985, it was “absolutely devastating.”
“If it didn’t kill the children within a very short period of time, it left many of them with significant complications,” Yancy shared.
Dahlberg said Liam was vaccinated against Hib, but Yancy explained that her son likely contracted it from a child who was unvaccinated against the bacterial infection — meaning more children could be at risk of exposure.
Before the vaccine was introduced for children and then for infants in 1990, “about 20,000 children younger than 5 had a severe Hib disease each year, and about 1,000 died,” according to the Cleveland Clinic.
Since then, Hib infection rates have dramatically dropped in the US by more than 99% since 1991. By 2019, 0.15 out of every 100,000 children younger than 5 years old had a Hib disease.
In 2024, fewer than 50 cases were reported in the US, according to the CDC.
However, Dahlberg is urging parents to ensure their children are vaccinated against Hib so that other families never have to experience the same loss.
“I feel like I have failed my child because I could not protect him from everything that would cause harm,” the grieving mother said.
