Swine flu has claimed its third fatality in Portugal. An Angolan woman, aged 32, died in Lisbon’s Curry Cabral Hospital on Monday of pneumonia and organ failure.
The woman, 31 weeks pregnant, was admitted to hospital on August 18, where doctors carried out an emergency caesarean operation to save the baby, who survived.
The death of the otherwise healthy woman came a little over 24 hours after a 53-year-old man died from ‘respiratory failure’ in the intensive care unit at Porto’s São João Hospital on Sunday morning.
The previously healthy man, who was admitted to hospital on September 14 with a cough and high fever, quickly developed respiratory insufficiency and never recovered.
The hospital explained that the victim developed pneumonia in both lungs and died from a mixture of “shock and multi-organ failure”.
Neither the hospital nor the Ministry of Health gave further details about the second fatal case in Portugal of an apparently healthy person, as a direct result of contracting swine flu.
On September 26, the CDS-PP local elections candidate for Ourém, lawyer Diogo Alvim, died of the A (H1N1) flu virus after also being admitted to hospital without showing any other symptoms or underlying conditions or illnesses.
That patient, admitted on August 25th, failed to react to drugs and also died of pneumonia with multi-organ failure.
The number of confirmed cases of H1N1 in Portugal has now reached 884 with 107 new cases in the past week and three patients being treated in hospital. The number of patients reported at hospitals and health centres with flu-like illnesses has reached 1,772.
