APPIAH: STUDENT DIED ‘IN HOURS’ FROM COMMON COLD

A grieving mother wept as she told an inquest how her ‘fit’ young son died from common flu last winter.
 
Sintim Appiah, a computer programming student, was rushed to hospital in January when the virus he had been treating with paracetamol left him struggling to stand up or see.

Doctors battled to save Mr Appiah, 34, but he quickly deteriorated and was dead within a matter of hours.

His mother Dinah Osei said she still cannot understand how her son was killed by the common condition, which affects thousands of people every year.

Ms Osei had given him painkillers when he first complained of a headache on January 2, Southwark Coroner’s Court heard.

She said: ‘He couldn’t eat, he lost his appetite and started vomiting. So on the third day I called NHS Direct and described his symptoms, and they said it must be flu.

‘They said to make sure he was drinking a lot and the next day to go to the chemists and get him some tablets.’

But Mr Appiah’s condition worsened dramatically overnight and at lunchtime the next day, she called him an ambulance.

By that stage he was unable to walk and paramedics had to carry him out of the house on a stretcher.

Ms Osei stayed with her son for eight hours at St Thomas’ Hospital, south east London, before heading home at 8.30pm.
 
‘I told him I’d be back the next morning,’ she said.

‘At about 10.30pm I got a call from the hospital saying he had become agitated and wouldn’t cooperate, so they wanted to sedate him.

‘Then a few hours later the called again and said they were trying to save him – if I didn’t come soon I wouldn’t see him alive.

‘I said “what do you mean, you’re trying to save him?” But when I arrived, he had gone.’

In the hours that passed, Mr Appiah had stopped breathing and been moved to intensive care as doctors tried to find out what was wrong with him.

He was attached to a ventilator and suffered a series of cardiac arrests, the last of which left him with brain damage.

Realising he could not be saved, medical staff reluctantly decided not to resuscitate him.

A post-mortem revealed Mr Appiah, of Thessaly Road, Battersea, had severely damaged and fluid-filled lungs.
 
Pathologist Simi George said even if doctors had diagnosed him with flu, his condition would have been too serious to treat.

She said: ‘There are viral treatments – how effective they are I’m not sure. But his lungs were so extensively damaged, I can’t see how that could have been reversed.’

Recording a verdict of death by natural causes, deputy coroner Dr Adela Williams said Mr Appiah’s family had given him the ‘appropriate’ care.

She added: ‘We all know influenza can be a devastating infection and perhaps surprisingly it’s often young people who can be worst affected.

‘Tragic though it is, in this case of a young, fit man that seems to be what happened.’

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