A 16-year-old Canadian girl has died after a virus that started out as the “stomach flu” invaded her heart, Montreal-based newspaper The Gazette is reporting.

Karèle Galaise-Séguin, 16, of Granby, Quebec, died Friday night at the Montreal Children’s Hospital after suffering a cerebral hemorrhage.

Health authorities said a 70-year-old woman died and a 57-year-old man is critically ill in a Boston hospital after each was given a kidney from an infected donor, reports The Boston Globe.

The kidney was infected with a hard-to-detect virus, health officials said, which came from a 49-year-old homeless man who suffered irreversible brain damage and cardiac arrest.

The donor carried a germ called lymphocytic choriomenigitis virus, which is most often transmitted by rodents and usually unnoticed by healthy people who do not suffer anything more than flu-like symptoms, according to the newspaper.

The virus also killed three transplants patients in Massachusetts and Rhode Island in 2005.

Organs perish quickly and they are tested for diseases such as AIDS, hepatitis and herpes, but not usually viruses such as lymphocytic choriomenigitis. And, since the demand for organs is so great, recipients will often take the organs of homeless people, the newspaper said.

Man’s best friend will soon be getting bone marrow transplants.  The Vancouver Sun says Washington State University in Seattle will start offering them to canines with lymphoma this summer.

Veterinary Oncologist Dr. Jeffrey Bryan says over the years the procedure has been done experimentally in dogs. 

Bone marrow transplants have been done routinely for humans in the past two decades and save thousands of lives, so Bryan believes it can do the same for dogs.

But, it won’t be cheap – the procedure will cost $20,000.

“This represents a big giveback to the canine species,” Bryan said.

Eighteen-year-old Leanne Nicholson is recovering from her second heart transplant in six years.   The teen from England told London’s Daily Mail that there is a million-to-one chance of getting a second heart transplant. 

Nicholson was healthy until the age of 12 when a virus attacked the muscle tissue of her heart. She was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy, an enlargement of the heart tissue.

Doctors said her heart was so damaged it was as if she had suffered three major heart attacks – the upper two chambers of her heart were not functioning at all and the lower two were barely beating.

She was immediately put on life support, but a donor was found quickly.

However, within 14 months, Nicholson’s body began to reject the heart and she felt ill again.

Doctors told her she would need another new heart.