Friday, June 30, 2006

What you don't know can kill you

Want to know how much we don't know about Congenital Heart Defects?

Yesterday, a 12 year old boy died at Disney -MGM in Florida. The first reaction was that his death was caused by the Rock 'n' Roller Coaster. After an autopsey, they discovered that this boy had an undetected congenital heart defect. He was TWELVE and no one even knew he had a CHD, until it was too late.

Here are the CNN stories

from Yesterday (story) and (video)
follow up from Today (story)

And from what I've been told (but haven't found the story yet) another child with undetected CHD died at Disney-MGM just last month.

3 comments:

  1. This amazes me. Just baffles me to pieces.

    The hospital pediatrician who examined Moose before we were discharged from the birth center didn't catch Moose's murmer. Our regular pediatrician did. She happened to be a pediatric cardiac specialist who also saw non-cardiac pediatric patients. It was just a murmer. It healed in time on its own. I just don't understand why the hospital's pediatrician didn't catch it, or how a 12 year old can be walking around with an undiagnosed CHD. I don't get it. And it upsets me.

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  2. Well, murmurs actually go undetected quite often, but heart murmurs (as far as my understanding goes anyway) don't cause kids to die on roller coasters. I don't know exactly what this boy had, but it had to have been fairly serious.

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  3. We talked about that here at work last week or whenever that happened

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