Soccer injury ends in death for East Rand teen
However, an inquest is underway to uncover the reason for the boy’s death.
Tsepang Rankeng, 13, came home on 28 August complaining of pain in his knee following a school soccer match. On Sunday, Tsepang’s father, Moshoeshoe Mahamo, said he took him to be seen at the Thelle Mogoerane Regional Hospital’s family clinic.
According to Mahamo, Tsepang was seen by a doctor who wrote the teen a prescription and referred to him to the hospital’s orthopaedic department where
Tsepang was given an injection of the drug Voltaren, which is used to relieve pain and swelling.
According to Tsepang’s family, the teen developed diarrhoea and blurry vision as well as changes in the colour of his urine.
Voltaren is made by Swiss drug manufacturers Novartis. According to the drug’s package insert, any one of these symptoms should have been a warning that Tsepang may have been having an adverse reaction to the medication.
These kinds of severe reactions to the medicine are very rare and occur in fewer than 1 in 10,000 people, according to the UK’s eMC Medicine Guide, which is written by independent pharmacists and checked by European medicine control councils.
According to Tsepang’s grandmother Alice Maele, health care workers never told the family that the injection could have side effects.
“They did not explain to us that what must we do if the boy had side effects from the injection,” said Maele, adding that health workers had confirmed that the boy received the injection and assured the family it had no side effects.
[quote float= right]”They did not explain to us that what must we do if the boy had side effects from the injection”
When Tsepang’s symptoms worsened, the family returned to Thelle Mogoerane Regional Hospital where Tsepang was admitted. When the boy began struggling to breathe, Mahamo said a crowd of doctors surrounded the teen trying to help him but that Tsepang passed away.
According to Maele, health workers told the family that the boy had died of chicken pox.
“It is not going to bring our boy back, but the hospital must pay for what they have done to us,” she told Health-e News.
The Gauteng Department of Health Spokesperson Steve Mabona confirmed that Tsepang had been treated by the hospital and that the South African Police Services (SAPS) are investigating the circumstances surrounding his death.
“The South African Police Services are currently conducting an inquest into the circumstances surrounding the death of the said patient,” Mabona said. “The department will await the outcome of the inquest before we make any comments on the matter.”
According to Katlehong SAPS Spokesperson Constable Patric Mashiyane (corr), an inquest docket has been opened and the police are currently awaiting results from Tsepang’s post-mortem results. – Health-e News.
An edited version of this story also appeared on Health24.com
- Never miss a story. Subscribe to our free, weekly email newsletter
- Read more from Health-e News intern reporter Thabo Molelekwa
Author
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Unless otherwise noted, you can republish our articles for free under a Creative Commons license. Here’s what you need to know:
You have to credit Health-e News. In the byline, we prefer “Author Name, Publication.” At the top of the text of your story, include a line that reads: “This story was originally published by Health-e News.” You must link the word “Health-e News” to the original URL of the story.
You must include all of the links from our story, including our newsletter sign up link.
If you use canonical metadata, please use the Health-e News URL. For more information about canonical metadata, click here.
You can’t edit our material, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style. (For example, “yesterday” can be changed to “last week”)
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. Health-e News understands that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarise or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
You can’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
If you share republished stories on social media, we’d appreciate being tagged in your posts. You can find us on Twitter @HealthENews, Instagram @healthenews, and Facebook Health-e News Service.
You can grab HTML code for our stories easily. Click on the Creative Commons logo on our stories. You’ll find it with the other share buttons.
If you have any other questions, contact info@health-e.org.za.
Soccer injury ends in death for East Rand teen
by jamesthabo, Health-e News
September 22, 2015