Sister relives memories of deadly Powassan virus
Sue Cossar’s four-year-old brother was the first victim, in 1958. He contracted it and died less than a week later. Ticks were to blame. RANDY BOSWELL reports.
It’s a rare but life-threatening infection spread to humans by tiny ticks encountered in the woods or backyard gardens. And this summer, a Powassan virus health scare in the U.S. prompted a New York senator, U.S. medical authorities and even the New York Times to warn of an urgent need for better research, prevention and treatment strategies to combat a pathogen that’s on the rise — perhaps due to climate change — throughout the Great Lakes region.
But the virus that grabbed headlines south of the border in August has a tragic Canadian connection that explains its name and still haunts a Northern Ontario family that, in 1958, suffered the sudden loss of a four-year-old son and brother from what was then an unknown infectious agent.
At the same time, however, the child’s death gave science what remains its key weapon against the virus: a test developed by Canadian microbiologists to identify the deadly organism, which attacks the central nervous system and can cause fatal or crippling encephalitis — brain swelling — in about 30 per cent of those who develop symptoms.
For more than 50 years, the first documented victim of the disease — a preschooler from Powassan, Ont. — has been referenced only anonymously in medical reports and scientific journals. In keeping with privacy rules, medical investigators kept descriptions of the boy and his final days clinically bare: “During the afternoon of the fourth day after onset,” noted the landmark 1959 study that announced the isolation of the Powassan virus, “the patient suddenly stopped breathing. He was placed immediately in an artificial respirator. Spontaneous respiration did not recommence … .”
But now the boy’s 65-year-old sister — just 10 at the time of her brother’s death — has spoken publicly for the first time about the anguish of a family tragedy now immortalized in the name of a fatal infection. And when Sue Cossar remembers the September 1958 death of her little brother, Lincoln Brian Byers, her words convey an enduring grief but also a hint of solace that doctors — while initially confounded by the boy’s death — were able to discover what took his life.
“He was an amazing little guy,” said Cossar, who was secondyoungest of the nine Byers children and had a special fondness for Lincoln, next in line and the “baby” of the family.
“He loved picking berries,” she said. “He was a really good kid. It was very hard on my mom and dad.”
Mom and Dad are both gone now, but in 1958, the family lived on a farm about 12 kilometres west of Powassan, a property still owned by one of Cossar’s elder brothers. Lincoln, she recalled, loved animals and thrived in the rural setting.
The first sign of trouble came on a late-summer afternoon, Sept. 17.
“I remember him going to the barn with the boys — with my two older brothers. And they brought him up from the barn because his eyes had started twitching. He couldn’t control his eyes.”
Lincoln was taken to the family doctor in Powassan. “Dr. (J.E.) Dillane — I don’t know how — he knew right away. He told Mom and Dad: ‘You get him to Sick Kids’ Hospital as quick as you can.’ ”
In those days, it was at least a sixhour drive to Toronto’s renowned Hospital for Sick Children. “They took him down that night,” Cossar said. “Two days later, he went into a coma — I think that was on a Tuesday. By the Friday, he had died. It was very traumatic.”
Dr. Donald McLean, a Sick Kids physician and medical researcher specializing in microbiology, along with his colleague, Dr. W.L. Donohue, had tracked Lincoln’s deteriorating condition and sought permission from the Byers family for an autopsy. The two doctors detected an anomalous inflammation in the boy’s brain tissue that would come to define a strain of virus new to the medical world.
The course of Lincoln’s illness was summarized in a May 1959 article by McLean and Donohue in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. McLean and Donohue discovered, under the microscope, inflamed cerebral tissue and “degenerating nerve cells.” Later experiments with mice exposed to the infection confirmed Lincoln had died from a newly identified viral pathogen: Powassan virus.
Cossar recalls how McLean and his colleagues then travelled to Powassan and surrounding areas to conduct an emergency study. Researchers found a high concentration of virus-carrying ticks in squirrels and the findings appeared in later editions of the CMAJ.
“My brothers, they would catch squirrels,” Cossar said. “They would skin these squirrels. And Lincoln would hold them … . ”
A severe case in northern New York this summer and new studies showed a greater-than-expected reservoir of the virus in Hudson Valley. Saskatoon-based Canadian Co-operative Wildlife Health Centre, reports the Powassan virus has been diagnosed in people in Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick.