Recently, there were several reports of deaths from idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.
The victims suffered acute pneumonia which developed into pulmonary fibrosis, or scarring of the lungs. The peculiarity is that most of the patients suffering from this is pregnant women, and the reason for this is unknown. And today, I read a news article that third pregnant woman died of that mystery virus
There are many questions about this on-going situation. The virus assumed to be the cause of this symptom is unidentified, and it is not clear whether it's contagious or not.
According to the article that I have linked above, this "new" acute pneumonia is unusual because the virus have infected young healthy pregnant women, and killed them in a very short period of time. The symptoms are also very different. While patients of regular pneumonia usually show early symptoms such as fever, The patients of this new acute pneumonia had sudden breathing difficulties.
This current situation reminded me of some sci-fi horror movies I had watched before, those with themes of unknown virus threatening the mankind.
The situation is not as dramatic or terrifying as in the movies, but I was so shocked at the fact that we people are 'actually' being threatened by some unknown virus and couldn't figure out the exact cause and produce a solution to this. Several days have passed and we are still in the uncertain situation.
I guess I had somehow unconsciously thought that the world I am living in right now had no problems that cannot be solved, with all of today's state of the art, high-technology.
We have already lost three lives. Everything must be done to find out the answer to this situation as soon as possible, and adequate measures should follow promptly to stop anymore lives from getting lost.
This is indeed sad.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, we are very far from living in a world where our problems are solved. Lots of people die every day from things that should be preventable -- assorted illnesses, drowning in the pool, car accidents, suicides, crime, and so on.
The amount of resources given to trying to prevent these deaths is usually proportional to the media attention rather than to the number of people who are affected. This, in my opinion, is the real tragedy.