Four Transplants Follow a Jerusalem Boy's Flu Death

A six-year-old boy from Jerusalem died of what doctors described as an exceptionally rare complication of influenza, and his organs were donated at his family’s request, enabling four transplants at hospitals around Israel. He had been brought to Shaare Zedek Medical Centre in critical condition days after developing a fever and a cough, and deteriorated with unusual speed.

“He tested positive for the flu, arrived almost dead, and suffered a very rapid deterioration,” the hospital said in a statement. “He suffered from a complication resulting from the flu. This is a super rare case: the boy was vaccinated.” He was pronounced dead shortly after arrival despite prolonged resuscitation and intensive care. The hospitals said his was the second death of a child from influenza in Israel that year, after a ten-year-old girl reported days earlier.

Where the organs went

The liver was transplanted into a six-year-old boy at Schneider Children’s Medical Centre in Petah Tikva. One kidney went to a 44-year-old woman at Beilinson Medical Centre in the same city, and the other to a nine-year-old boy at Rambam Medical Centre in Haifa. The small intestine was transplanted at Beilinson into Daniel Haim Biton, 36, only the third intestinal transplant ever performed in Israel.

Dr Eviatar Nesher, who heads Beilinson’s transplant department, said the seven-hour intestinal operation required “precise coordination between many teams and high surgical skills”. Biton had lived seventeen years without a functioning digestive system, fed through a central venous catheter; he said he now hoped to “eat like everyone else and become a chef”. The National Transplant Centre said all four recipients were recovering well.

An early and unusually hard flu season

The death came during a season Israel’s Health Ministry had already flagged as starting early and moving fast, with international monitoring pointing to severe illness. Israeli hospital surveillance bore that out. The Times of Israel reported in early December 2025 that the national Center for Disease Control had logged 394 new influenza A cases across fourteen hospitals in the week ending 29 November, 163 of them in children (around five times the equivalent period a year earlier), with about a quarter of respiratory PCR samples positive for influenza A against 5 per cent the previous year. The dominant subtype was A(H3N2). Fewer than 15 per cent of members of Israel’s health funds had been vaccinated at that point. The Jerusalem Post reported the Health Ministry counting 1,165 flu hospitalisations and 26 deaths within 30 days of a confirmed infection by late November, with at least 30 children admitted to intensive care, and vaccination running below 10 per cent among children.

The ministry’s message was that vaccination does not reliably prevent infection but does reduce severity and the risk of serious illness or death, and that free vaccines are available through the health insurers for everyone aged six months and older.

How organ donation is organised in Israel

The transplants were coordinated by the National Transplant Centre, known as ADI, which was established by the Health Ministry in 1994 and runs the national donor registry. Its donor card is named after Ehud Ben Dror, who died waiting for a kidney. The donation in this case was made at the family’s request.

“One child, a whole life that continues thanks to him,” the centre said.

What is still unclear

Neither the hospitals nor the Health Ministry specified which complication of influenza caused the death, or how rare “super rare” is in reported cases. The boy’s vaccination date and how recently he had been immunised were not given, and no post-mortem findings were released. The statements did not say how long the recipients had been waiting, and this account does not name the child, who was a minor.