Maggie Wilcox will not be forgotten, as her memory lives on in this battle for a vaccine.
/ Alex Resila
OSWEGO -- Maggie Wilcox lost her life to eastern equine encephalitis. Better known as triple E, this virus drove together the Oswego community today. Her family is battling to bring awareness to Triple-E by hosting a benefit today in Maggie's honor.
The Wilcox family is working to make sure that this can be stopped when other young children contract Triple-E. Maggie's family learned that a vaccine is already available for the military. They want the public to be be able to have this vaccine as well.
Donna Wilcox is Maggie's Aunt. "Our end goal is to one day be able to say we have a a human vaccine available for Triple-E, that's commercially available and you need to contact your doctor so that your children can be vaccinated," says Wilcox.
Maggie's Uncle, Mike Wilcox, is known as "Unc" around his family. "We knew for the last year how this community can pull together and be able to bond themselves and go after looking for awareness and eventually this cure," says Wilcox. "I would expect it to become bigger and bigger until ultimately we get where we need to be, until we find a cure."
Representative Dan Maffei knows that this family can use his help in getting their message out to pharmaceutical companies and the FDA to make this vaccine public. "One of the things that I'm going to do is find out if there is any federal funding, and if there isn't, how we can work with other kinds of research on various other forms of encephalitis," says Maffei.
Today's fundraiser helped to bring in over $10,000 to the Maggie Sue Glenister Wilcox Foundation in this family's fight to make this public.
