Child Diagnosed with Meningitis Dies

Jayce Brown

There is sad news tonight about the nine-year-old child who was on life support with meningitis. News Five learned that he passed away earlier today, just as family and friends were planning to hold a prayer vigil for him on Saturday in Belmopan. Jayce Brown, a student at United Evergreen Primary School, fell ill last Wednesday with flu-like symptoms and was brought to the K.H.M.H. after his condition deteriorated. Brown was the only case that was positively diagnosed as meningitis, but a second child, aged five, who shared the same day care facility as he, is also hospitalized with similar, though not as severe symptoms. On Wednesday, Director of Public Health and Wellness, Doctor Melissa Diaz-Musa told the media that from Brown was diagnosed, physicians were already looking into the case.

Melissa Diaz-Musa

Dr. Melissa Diaz-Musa, Director of Public Health & Wellness

“The hospital doctors, the pediatrician looking after his care, they’re going into detail to see if perhaps he had some risk factors or you know, children might – maybe he had just gotten better from another infection. So there are many things that contribute to your immune response. So it’s not anything to say that one person will definitely be very, very ill and another won’t. Meningitis on a whole is something that is a serious infection. So if you could imagine that the meninges are protecting our brain and spinal cord and your brain is responsible for everything in your body. Just having meningitis, whether it’s viral, fungal bacterial, that is a major diagnosis. So, people with meningitis, no matter what organism causes it, may have long lasting side effects. from meningitis. Some people recover but are not able to hear or – it affects many different aspects. So we can definitely pinpoint to say who would get severe meningitis or who won’t. Now, having said that, with meningococcal meningitis, that’s the neisseria meningitidis that I spoke about, that we don’t commonly see in Belize. With that meningitis, children in particular who are prone to it and teenagers, they get very, very ill. And it has a very high mortality rate. I was just talking today in the epidemiologist and we have not had a documented case of meningitis, I think, for at least 10 years, a documented case of meningitis. So it’s definitely not a common infection that we see in Belize. In other countries, there are many cases of meningitis, but in Belize, it’s not something that we see often. I know that we have had suspicion in for adults having meningitis, but for children, it’s been a long time.”