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H1N1 death reported in Volusia Co.
Updated: Friday, 05 Feb 2010, 10:19 PM EST
Published : Friday, 05 Feb 2010, 10:19 PM EST
The Volusia County Health Department (VCHD) has received notification of an H1N1 flu related death of a 26 year old female. This is the sixth H1N1 flu related death reported to VCHD since this new strain of flu was identified in April.
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Tanya Torres was only 5 when she and her parents learned a transfusion that saved her life shortly after birth had introduced the virus that causes AIDS into her blood.
Doctors told her parents Torres faced an early death sentence, but experimental drug treatments, family support and counseling turned her into a spunky advocate for children infected with HIV and she took her message to Capitol Hill, national television and AIDS support groups across the country.
Torres
Torres died Tuesday at age 26, her body overwhelmed by a series of infections following a case of swine flu she contracted in early October.
"At a time when few people with HIV shared their secret -- with good reason -- Tanya bravely spoke openly about living with HIV/AIDS. . . . Her legacy lives on through the lives she saved with her AIDS educational work," Neil Willenson wrote in an e-mail to Torres mother, Brenda Sagram of Edgewater.
Willenson is the founder of Camp Heartland, a Minnesota camp for HIV-infected children that Torres attended for many years.
Torres was diagnosed as HIV positive just before she started kindergarten at Chisholm Elementary in New Smyrna Beach. Her mother notified her teacher of the diagnosis, setting off a review of Torres' educational placement and a schoolwide education campaign to dispel myths about the risks of casual contact with people carrying the AIDS virus.
It was the late 1980s when national headlines were filled with stories of an HIV-infected Indiana boy who had to get a federal court order to attend school and an Arcadia family whose home was set afire after they enrolled their three HIV-infected sons in DeSoto County schools.
The education campaign at Chisholm succeeded in calming fears, said former guidance counselor Barbara Dudrow.
By the time Torres reached middle school, she took a matter-of-fact attitude toward educating classmates about AIDS. "She was just a real trouper at school in the way she handled the whole thing. . . She was such a spunky little girl," said retired counselor Molly Gardner.
Torres graduated cum laude from New Smyrna Beach High School in 2002 and gave birth to a healthy son, Damian Brown, five years ago.
She spent nine weeks in a drug-induced coma at Bert Fish Medical Center in New Smyrna Beach after falling ill in October before being transferred to a rehabilitation hospital in Green Cove Springs in December, Sagram said.
She shared hamburgers with her son when he visited her there and planned to be home with him by Christmas. But it wasn't long before she contracted pneumonia again and her weakened immune system was unable to fight off a series of other infections.
Sagram said Torres died clutching a clown her son gave her to keep her company at the hospital. She'll be buried today with that clown and a doll she received as a gift on her fourth birthday.
The doll was one of the details Torres dictated when she planned her own funeral at age 5 after hearing doctors tell her parents she would die early.
"I had 16 years longer with her than they first told me to expect," her mother said Sunday. "She did a lot with her life."
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