No Prior Existing Conditions but Dead Anyway

[indigo girl]

http://www.todaystmj4.com/news/local/48007842.html

Who would think that a normally healthy woman would die so swiftly from influenza in June?

Could you ever have imagined such a thing? No wonder her family and friends are in shock.

So why did it happen?

Barbara Davis, 48, was healthy just a week ago. She had dinner with her mother Josephine last Friday night. But just hours after that dinner, Josephine got a phone call.

"My friend, he called me and told me Barbara was real sick. And I said, "Well, she wasn't sick when I left, so what's the matter?" Josephine Davis said.

Barbara told her mother that she was ok. But the next day, things got worse. She had trouble breathing, and she was shaking. She could barely walk into the hospital.

"She tried to talk to people, but she just couldn't talk," Josephine Davis said.

Doctors treated her for two days, but they couldn't save her. They believe she died from swine flu.

"They've never seen nothing like that, what she had. That infection just went through her body, attacking her kidney, her lungs, her liver. Everything," said Josephine Davis.

The Milwaukee Health Department confirmed on Friday a Milwaukee adult with no underlying medical conditions died from swine flu, though they haven't confirmed Barbara Davis was that victim.

Barbara's family knows all too well how serious swine flu can be.

"Everybody is just in a shock. The people that I talked to today, they are frightened. Because it happened all of a sudden," Josephine Davis said.

More than 1,800 people have caught swine flu in Milwaukee alone. The city's Health Department is stressing that if you are mildly ill with flu symptoms, you should call your doctor. If your symptoms are serious or if you have mild symptoms that are getting worse, you should see a doctor right away.

http://www.wisn.com/health/19751526/detail.html

The Milwaukee County Medical Examiner said 48-year-old Barbara Davis died Thursday in the ICU after being diagnosed with the flu strain.

The health department said, unlike Milwaukee's first swine flu victim, Davis did not have any "underlying medical conditions" that would have put her at a greater risk for the disease.

http://www.flutrackers.com/forum/showpost.php?p=248304&postcount=7

This post was written by Dr. Gratten Woodsen, MD commenting over at flutrackers on this unfortunate woman's case.

The decedent is described as having fulminate multi-organ failure that developed rapidly resulting in death 48 hours after onset and despite intensive medical therapy in an ICU including all the bells and whistles.

The attending physicians told the mother that they had never seen anything like this before and I believe them. So did she. No one has seen anything like this since 1918. In 1918 many doctors said the say thing after dealing with their first cases of Spanish Flu and for them too it was a great surprise at least until those that didn't die from the virus themselves had seen it so many times that it was no longer unique.

There are numerous descriptions from the 1918 pandemic that match the one above but no where else in medical history do we find anything remotely similar. This is why the doctors in Milwaukee were so shocked by what they saw.

How many other North American victims had similar pathology? Why have the autopsy and clinical findings from the deaths in Mexico, the US and Canada been suppressed?

I know from press reports that there have been other US deaths where multi-organ failure was present. Is this common among those who have died of Swine Flu or rare? Are the findings similar to those seen in 1918 or not?

(hat tip flutrackers/skatman)

[indigo girl]

Knoxville, Tennessee

http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2010/mar/28/h1n1-suspected-in-death-vaccine-is-available/

Cathy Briscoe-Graves and her 23-year-old daughter both got very sick on a Friday with serious, flu-like symptoms: coughing, headaches, body aches.

Their primary-care physician suspected the H1N1 influenza strain, Briscoe-Graves said, though he didn't test them, because that's the most common flu strain circulating in this area.

In fact, the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has noted a recent spike in H1N1 activity - and the number of related deaths - in Tennessee and the Southeast region.

...a chest X-ray showed filled lungs, a life-threatening case of pneumonia, probably caused by the young woman coughing so hard with the flu that she aspirated stomach acid.

On March 19, Briscoe-Graves' young, vibrant daughter - who loved painting, drawing, genealogy and scrapbooking and looked forward to being a bridesmaid in her brother's October wedding - died of pneumonia, despite specialists' valiant efforts to save her, her mother said.

(hat tip flutrackers/tetano)

http://www.tributes.com/show/Martha-Graves-88148010

http://www.volunteertv.com/news/headlines/89483692.html

Local health officials say they're seeing a resurgence of the H1N1 flu this spring. Complications from H1N1 have also claimed the life of one Knoxville young woman.

Martha Graves, 23, was a healthy young woman until she and her mother, Cathy, came down with the flu-like symptoms. "Kind of a sore throat, definitely aches and pains. And we were just bed-ridden," said Cathy Briscoe-Graves. She says she didn't know the pair had H1N1, until it was too late.

"My youngest child, and it's just very difficult to lose a child as a parent," said Briscoe-Graves.

[indigo girl]

Orange County, Calfornia

http://www.ocregister.com/articles/h1n1-241783-state-hospitalized.html

An Orange County man died of the H1N1 virus last week, the county's first fatality from the disease since late January.

The adult male, who had no complicating health problems that would make him particularly vulnerable to swine flu, became ill while outside the country, said Dr. Michele Cheung, deputy medical director, epidemiology, with the county's Health Care Agency.

(hat tip flutrackers/RoRo)