Recovering From Severe Tetanus

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31190, 14 October 1966, Page 2

Recovering From Severe Tetanus

(New Zealand Press Association; ROTORUA, October 13. A Rotorua three-year-old, Maurice Tangiwai, is too young to realise just how lucky he is. He has just returned to Rotorua Hospital after spending nearly five months in the Auckland Hospital respiratory unit as a severe tetanus case.

Several times, while being treated in the unit, he nearly died. But now he is fit again after undergoing what a spokesman for the unit des-

cribed “the full treatment.” Within a few weeks, he will be allowed to return home. Maurice, son of Mrs Emma Tangiwai, was flown to Auckland on May 11, accompanied by a member of the Rotorua Hospital medical staff, within four hours of the first symptoms. Emergency treatment had been initiated at Rotorua Hospital. For three weeks he lay paralysed and unconscious in the Auckland unit. Machines did his breathing for him. Few other tetanus patients have had respiratory functions taken over for so long, according to the spokesman. Because of the long term, an artificial airway was put in the boy’s neck. Maurice had several operations. At one stage, his stomach was opened because his bowels had failed to function. “It is only treatment received in special units such as the one at Auckland that has made possible recovery from what was almost invariably a few years ago a fatal condition,” said Dr. E. H. Bridgeman, medical superintendent of Rotorua Hospital today.