Doctor blamed for man’s malaria death
GP’s failure to contact patient ‘worrisome’
A PRETORIA East general practitioner who did not warn a patient in time that he had contracted a potentially deadly strain of malaria was “worrisome”, a judge said.
She has referred her judgment in the case to the Health Professions Council of South Africa. The judge found the doctor’s negligence was probably the cause of the man’s death.
Pretoria paramedic Anthony Boucher died of cerebral malaria on March 19, 2015. His wife, Maritza Boucher, instituted a damages claim in the Gauteng High Court, Pretoria, against Dr Jurgen Jacobus Odendaal.
She is claiming loss of support for herself and their 4-year-old daughter.
Acting Judge H Barnes found the doctor was 100% liable for the damages the widow could prove she had suffered. Experts agreed that if Odendaal had acted earlier to ensure Anthony had been told he had tested positive for Falciparum malaria, he could still be alive. This malaria strain is the most serious and potentially fatal.
Odendaal said he had sent several text messages to Anthony to inform him of the test results. The problem was he had sent them to his patient’s old cellphone number and the messages never reached him.
Odendaal also claimed he had sent WhatsApp messages to Anthony. But the court found that was not true, as it was testified on behalf of Vodacom that one could not send a WhatsApp message if the person’s number was not in their contact list.
The judge questioned why, even if this was true, Odendaal had not noticed that there were no blue ticks next to the message, meaning Anthony had never received the message.
Another untruth was that the doctor claimed that when he could not get hold of the patient to tell him that he had to immediately receive treatment for his malaria, he had faxed a script for Halfan medication to Faerie Glen Pharmacy.
The experts agreed in any event that Halfan was an outdated medication and not suitable in this case.
The widow, who claimed her husband had died as a result of Odendaal’s negligence, said he had gone to work in Liberia just before he became ill to work on a project involving the setting up of Ebola treatment centres. When he came back, he fell ill and suspected he had malaria.
He saw his doctor a few days later – on a Friday – and Odendaal took a blood sample for testing, saying he would contact the patient as soon as he got the results. Boucher said Anthony’s condition had deteriorated over the next few days and they heard nothing from the doctor. She had sent the doctor a message on the Wednesday to say her husband’s eyeballs had turned yellow and asked the doctor to call her husband.
She also tried in vain to phone the doctor. As she was about to leave work to check on her husband, she received an SMS from Odendaal, who said he had been trying to get hold of her husband since the weekend to tell him he urgently needed medication as he had malaria. Anthony died a few days later in hospital. It was said that had Odendaal ensured he had got hold of Anthony on the previous Friday, when he got the results, the patient could have survived as his malaria count was still fairly low. Boucher said she was happy with the judgment.