Swine Flu Kills Young Girl

Victim was South Bay resident

Updated 10:14 PM PST, Wed, Oct 14, 2009

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The child was brought to the ER at Rady Children's Hospital.

A 5-year-old girl from South Bay is the first child in the county without underlying medical issues to die from the swine flu.

The child died on Saturday at about 1 a.m. at Children's Hospital after arriving at the emergency room on Friday night.

The girl was a kindergartener at Howard Pence Elementary School in Otay Mesa. The school is part of the South Bay Union School District. Teachers and staff were informed of situation Monday after returning from a 2 week fall break according to a notice on the district website. The notice also said all of the classrooms had been cleaned and that the janitors would spend extra time cleaning the campus in coming weeks.

Dr John Bradley, the director of the division of infectious disease at Rady Children's Hospital, said the child had moderate flu-like symptoms, including a 102 degree fever, a runny nose, congestion, a sore throat and achiness for about 48 hours prior to arriving at the hospital. The girl's parents took her to the hospital after she began vomiting, Bradley said.

The child was able to walk into the ER on her own but collapsed in the waiting area roughly two hours after she arrived, Bradley said, because her heart had stopped. "She was taken up to the intensive care unit, but problem was her heart kept stopping, she kept needing more and more rounds of medicine and eventually it became clear her heart just wasn't going to work".

Health officials said the case was complicated and very unusual but was something that they also see with normal influenza.