Two young Indonesians died of suspected H5N1 today. Here is Reuters' report: Indonesian teenage girl died of bird flu-local test. Excerpt:
A 17-year-old Indonesian girl has died of bird flu, results from a local test showed, a health ministry official said.
Nyoman Kandun, a director general at the Health Ministry, said tests on the teenage girl from North Jakarta, who died on Tuesday, were positive for bird flu.
He did not elaborate how the girl got infected by the deadly virus.
The teenage girl's death came hours after the earlier death of a 16-year-old boy from the outskirts of Jakarta was confirmed by local tests as also being from bird flu.
If confirmed by a World Health Organisation-referred laboratory, the girl will be Indonesia's 44th confirmed human bird flu death, the highest in the world. Local tests are not considered definitive.
At some point, if and when a pandemic breaks out, we won't even be able to keep track of the deaths, let alone provide details about the victims like names and ages. But until then, it seems like simple decency to record some basic information about these early casualties.
I wish I knew these young people's names, and something about them and their families: How they made a living, what they studied in school, what they hoped to achieve in life.
I wish I knew what their doctors thought about the likely means of infection. And I wish I knew how their doctors treated them. Did these young people understand what was happening to them, and did they say anything about it to their families and caregivers?
And how will their families and communities remember these teenagers who had such a brief glimpse of life? If we could not give them 70 or 80 years, we should at least record something about them and the influence they had on the lives of others.
