Douglas County Coroner Randy Daniel is waging a one-man, all-out campaign to require heart testing for students before they can participate in high school athletics.
“This is just something we have to do,” Daniel said Wednesday. “We’ve had three young people die in the last few years.”
Daniel’s campaign was sparked by the Feb. 10 sudden death of a 14-year-old Chapel Hill High athlete, William Darrin Davis. The student had just finished track practice when he collapsed. Lifesaving measures were unsuccessful, and Davis was pronounced dead at the hospital emergency room.
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On Thursday afternoon, their friend Jonathan Nolon died after he collapsed while participating in an offseason football workout in the gym. Nolon was 16. The cause of death remains unknown and autopsy results are pending, according to the Maryland Medical Examiner’s office.
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FORT LAUDERDALE, FL – Former NFL players were recently given free heart screenings at The Heart Center of Excellence at Broward Health Bro-ward General Medical Center (BGMC). The screenings provide retired NFL players with state-of-the-art, preventative cardiovascular testing to detect early evidence of heart and blood vessel disease. The program was formed by the NFL Player Care Foundation (NFL PCF) along with the Boone Heart Institute (BHI) and the Living Heart Foundation (LHF).
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Within weeks, doctors at the University of Pennsylvania are planning to start offering some patients a genetic test to predict their heart-disease risk. The new test will pick up eight potential warning signs written in human DNA.
Most likely, these tests will be offered to adults. Hopefully, we will start to offer them to children. If an adult tests positive for a heart condition, wouldn’t she test positive as a child too? Wouldn’t it be helpful to have that information sooner? Couldn’t we save more lives?
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A teenage long distance runner collapsed and died during athletics competitions held at Makhubu Secondary School, Selibe-Phikwe on Friday last week.
Trevor Madala, 15, who was a Form 2 student at Phatsimo Secondary, collapsed after finishing a 12-round race in the first position. Although he was rushed to Selibe-Phikwe hospital, the budding marathon champion was certified dead on arrival. It is not yet clear what caused the death, but parents and the school management are all convinced that the extreme heat could have played a role.
Innocent Madala, the boy’s uncle said he heard about the tragic death while in Gaborone where he currently based.
“All I know is that my nephew died on the field after completing a 12-round race at first position. Witnesses revealed that my boy collapsed and never gained consciousness,” a grieving, Madala said explaining that the family were still waiting for a postmortem to determine the death of his nephew.
Phatsimo school head, Richard Bashe, confirmed the death and said Trevor’s sudden death came as a shock to the entire school. He revealed that Trevor was a dedicated sportsman who had been representing the school since he joined them as a Form 1 student last year.
“The boy’s sudden death is a painful thing to have befallen the school. He was a hero and we feel robbed of talented young friend and a budding athlete,” Bashe said.
He will be buried at Selibe-Phikwe on Saturday (tomorrow).
Overweight and weak, 10-year-old Mary Jackson Tofilon could not keep up physically with classmates at her Davenport school. She dragged behind the other children during gym class and always came in last during exercises such as the 600-yard run. “I thought it was because I was heavy,” Tofilon, now 57, said.
But a school-based heart screening indicated a serious problem, and the child and her mother found out Tofilon had been born with a defective aortic valve, which is key to the heart functioning properly. Read Full Story
This is a great news piece on Parent Heart Watch and the efforts of one mother to prevent other children from dropping dead.
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