By Trine Tsouderos
Chicago Tribune
CHICAGO – Nobody knows where Simon Sparrow picked up the bug that killed him.
One sunny April morning six years ago, the curly-haired toddler woke up with flulike symptoms; by afternoon he was struggling for breath. He went into septic shock. Doctors at the hospital gave him intravenous antibiotics, but the drugs failed.
By the next afternoon, Simon was dead at 18 months old, the victim of a highly drug-resistant bacterium, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. The day before, on the way to the hospital, he had learned the word “flower.”