A mother who ran marathons and was otherwise perfectly healthy has died from the flu in an extremely rare case.
Price Meropol McMahon, 36, died five days before Christmas after suffering complications from influenza, her family say.
The mother-of-two from Wellesley in Massachusetts was a successful athlete but reported feeling feverish on December 19 before finding herself struggling to breathe the following morning.
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By afternoon Price had been rushed to hospital, where she died only a few hours later.
Describing how staff at the hospital broke the news of her complications, her brother Ian Meropol told the Boston Globe: "The doctor’s words, I’ll always remember this..."
"‘This is a one-in-a-million case of influenza.’"
While flu kills an estimated 12,000 and 50,000 people in the United States each winter, it is exceptionally rare for a woman of Ms McMahon's age with no underlying health conditions to die as a result of contracting the virus.
Her brother revealed she had been training to run the famous Boston Marathon race for the first time next year around the time of her death, and had previously completed the New York Marathon in under four hours.
Mr Meropol described her as a "smart, hardworking, driven" woman who had been successful in her career, adding that it was ultimately her family that always came first.
Her 71-year-old father also paid tribute to his daughter, saying "she never talked about her successes in business, or running, or tennis" but instead was "100 percent family” oriented.
A GoFundMe page has now been set up to assist the family with costs involved in her passing, and has already easily passed its funding goal by raising $152,548 in five days.
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