Rare blood disease kills woman on her birthday during Caribbean break
A WOMAN died on her birthday after contracting a deadly blood infection on a dream Caribbean Christmas holiday.
Lynne Crouch woke up on Christmas Eve feeling nauseous and dizzy in her hotel room in the Dominican Republic.
The 54-year-old had felt fine the previous night after spending the evening in the hotel bar with her husband Peter, 63. But the next morning she was unable to stand and when she tried to go for lunch she vomited and collapsed.
Speaking from the Caribbean island, Mr Crouch, from Loughton in Essex, said: “It all happened so fast – one minute we were standing at the bar and the next morning Lynne couldn’t get out of bed.
“I was feeling 100 per cent but she became so ill so quickly – why did this happen to her and not me?
“She managed to get up at lunchtime but collapsed at the bottom of the stairs. When I put her back into bed she had no recollection of it.”
Mrs Crouch was diagnosed with meningococcemia, a rare bacterial blood infection of the same type that causes meningitis.
She died on her birthday in quarantine at 5pm, Sunday, after almost a week battling the infection.
Her husband added: “It’s just so confusing to think she is not with not know when he will be able to return to his family in the UK.
His brother Jamie has flown out to support him while he arranges for his wife’s body to be repatriated.
But with an autopsy yet to take place, the family do not know how Mrs Crouch contracted the bacteria or why it developed so quickly.
The widower said: “She is my wife, I can’t just leave her here. I don’t know when we will be back in the A NASA spacecraft has “phoned home” to confirm it had successfully performed the most distant space flyby in history in the early hours of New Year’s Day.
Thousands of photographs of the dark, icy space rock called Ultima Thule were snapped by the New Horizons probe as it barrelled past it on the outer edge of the solar system at around 5am UK time.
Delighted staff at the Nasa mission’s control centre at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland applauded after confirmation signals were received from the probe. There had been fears it could have been damaged by tiny space particles. “We have a healthy UK because we have to wait for the official paperwork. As it is new year many offices are shut.”
He said he and his wife “had an amazing life” and “enjoyed many holidays” during 10 blissful years spacecraft. We’ve just accomplished the most distant flyby,” said Alice Bowman, mission operations manager for New Horizons. “We are ready for Ultima Thule’s science transmission, science to help us understand the origins of our solar system.”
Ultima Thule lies four billion miles from Earth in the Kuiper Belt, a band of dwarf planets, space rocks and icy debris left over from the formation of the solar system 4.6 billion years ago. Because of the distance, scientists had to wait 10 hours to learn whether the flyby had been successful.
Pictures are due to be published this together. After meeting in their local pub in Loughton they quickly moved in together. They tied the knot on the Greek island of Kos last June.
Mr Crouch said: “We had a brilliant life – at least I can say that.” week, but the full download of the data will take 20 months to complete.
Alan Stern, principal investigator of the New Horizons mission, said images taken during the spacecraft’s approach suggested Ultima Thule is shaped like a bowling pin, with two bulbous ends. However, he said a possibility remained that it may be two separate objects locked in a tight orbit.
New Horizons is so distant that mission scientists had no way of helping out with any last-minute glitches.
Nasa’s Jim Bridenstine tweeted: “This is what leadership in space exploration is all about.”