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Famous deaths from simple causes

In this season of tampered tapes and stolen votes, allow me a moment to wallow in irrelevance and to talk off-topic – about famous deaths from simple causes.

I’m not talking about legendary deaths due to dramatic but straightforward causes, like Jesus dying on the cross or John F. Kennedy killed by a sniper shot.

I’m talking about moneyed people dying incongruously of stupid causes, like common diseases that afflict mostly the poor. I’m talking about people like Reyster Langit, rising broadcast journalist and son of veteran broadcaster Rey Langit, dying of falciparum malaria in a California hospital.

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Falciparum or cerebral or blackwater malaria is the most prevalent type of malaria, accounting for about 50 percent of all cases worldwide, estimated at 250 million yearly, and is responsible for up to 95 percent of all malarial deaths estimated at 2 million yearly.

The very words “falciparum” and “blackwater” give me the creeps since they sound so ancient and mysterious and lethal, and yet the sickness is so common today in rural villages in forested or swampy areas of the country.

As a child, I remember my father telling stories of how, as a guerrilla journalist in Abra-Ilocos during World War II, he watched helplessly as comrades died of the fever, untreated due to lack of drugs. He himself would be stricken with the same illness towards the end of the war, his blood turning whitish and his urine turning ominously black due to massive loss of red blood cells – thus the name “blackwater malaria”. He was saved just in time by the arrival of US Army medics.

(“And that is why I will never join your rallies against so-called US imperialism,” he would later exclaim in our endless dinner-table debates during the First Quarter Storm. But that’s for another story.)

Years later, I would lose a close friend to the same dreaded killer, and experience myself the same feverish and delirious paroxysms, thankfully not of the blackwater variety.

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The terror is so stark and yet so familiar to many rural people. For some reason, however, killer malaria has not been decisively addressed by the government, nor regularly publicized in the national media if only to warn urbanites and tourists who frequently travel to the hinterlands whether on vacation or business. That is, until Reyster fell sick of falciparum and died a week after covering a malarial outbreak in the Palawan hinterlands.

Ironically, Reyster’s US doctors had to get information from San Lazaro Hospital in Manila – where a member of Reyster’s news team was also hospitalized some days earlier – before they could diagnose and begin treating his illness correctly. By then it was too late.

Did a young and promising journalist have to die first, very tragically and unnecessarily, before the government is prodded into decisive action against malaria?

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I might sound very cynical, but maybe that’s how things should work out around here.

After all, tuberculosis had been a scourge in the country for centuries (especially among poor people), but the government started a serious anti-TB program only after Pres. Manuel Quezon died from that very disease in a New York hospital.

By now, however, the government’s anti-TB program has become sick itself, as tubercular as its patients. Maybe it’s time for another president to die of TB, if only to revive public awareness and galvanize government action? I hope not! (Un-Christian this might sound, but if I were able to choose the manner of death of the current president, it should be from diarrhea. Of the mouth.)

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But I digress. Let’s get on with this business of celebrity deaths.

Senator Rene Cayetano’s liver was first ravaged by hepatitis-B, before he ultimately died of liver cancer. So now do we have a revitalized hepa-B prevention program, aside from the costly vaccines being pushed by DOH?

Actor Rico Yan died of bangungot, the scourge of young Asian working-class males. So have you heard of any post-Rico Yan initiative to research and prevent more bangungot deaths?

Actor Miko Sotto fell off a high-rise building. So now do we have better occupational safety measures to prevent more high-rise falls, which should benefit thousands of construction workers if not condo yuppies who are always seeking new highs in more ways than one?

Speaker Joe de Venecia’s daughter was trapped and killed in a tragic fire. So now do we have results from the legislator’s gallant vow, made that same night, to work for better fire prevention laws and fire-fighting technology? Do urban poor slum communities sleep better now, safe from firestorms that are proving much quicker, cheaper and deadlier than demolition squads?

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I don’t wish that it actually turns out that way, but would provincial bus travel be safer now, had DOTC Sec. Leandro Mendoza and his family been riding that Byron Bus on that fateful day when 30 lives were lost along Marcos Highway?

Would food service in public schools be safer now, had DepEd Sec. Butch Abad’s children been eating the same poisoned cassava cake that killed 28 children in that Bohol elementary school?

Would villages downstream from big mines such as along the Abra River have safer water to drink, had DENR Sec. Mike Defensor’s parents happen to live and farm there?

I could go on and on, but I hope the point has been made.

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My apologies to the readers of this column for not having posted a piece for the past several months. My Writer’s Muse and I had a bit of a quarrel about Her demands taking up too much of my time, and in a flurry of exchanges, I told Her to go away.

I was thinking in terms of a week or two while I finished some reports. Hayun, nagtampo, lumayas ng tatlong buwan. I’m still trying to woo Her back. Not an easy task, I assure you. #

(Email your feedback to jun@nordis.net)

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