The father of a four-year-old Italian girl who died of malaria earlier this week said Friday on Facebook "you feel impotent facing a treacherous and aggressive disease like malaria, despite the cordiality and constant commitment of doctors and nurses. "You feel impotent when the media besiege you without respecting your grief", said Marco Zago.
"You feel impotent in learning from the papers that the body of your daughter has been first sequestred and then will be subjected to an autopsy without being informed, as if they were a mobster's assets. "Sadly, getting ill in Italy is not bad luck but a fault".
Sofia Zago died in a Brescia hospital after previous hospital stays in Portogruaro near Venice and Trento.
Probes are continuing at all three hospitals. An autopsy on Zago confirmed Thursday she died of cerebral complications following a bout of malaria.
Earlier sources at Portoguraro said she had been symptom-free during her spell in the hospital there, the first of three hospital stays.
The head of the health ministry's task force on the case, Raniero Guerra, said the girl may have been infected before she went to hospital, at a campsite at Bibione near Venice.
It is already known that the girl had the same parasite as two Burkina Faso girls who had returned from their home country.
The girl may have contracted the illness in the northern Italian hospital where the African family were successfully treated.
If the strain of malaria that killed the Italian girl was the same as one that hit four members of a Burkina Faso family who recovered, then the fatal infection "must" have taken place in a Trento hospital, the vice-president of the Italian society for infectious and tropical diseases, Massimo Galli, said on Wednesday.
The mother and teen brother of two malaria-recovered Burkina Faso girls aged 4 and 11 have also been successfully treated for malaria and discharged from a hospital in Trento where 4-year-old Sofia Zago probably contracted the disease and later died of it in Brescia, Trento hospital paediatrics chief Nunzia Di Palma said.
The parasite that gave fatal malaria to Zago was the same as the one that infected the two children who had returned from Burkina Faso and were in the same hospital as her in Trento, Di Palma said.
A Trento probe into Zago's death is looking into possible culpable homicide by persons as yet unidentified, sources said Wednesday.
Zago died in hospital in Brescia on Monday but she had previously been in hospital in Portogruaro near Venice and then in Trento in relation to diabetes.
In Trento, there were the two other children with malaria who were receiving treatment after their return form Africa.
The girl reportedly returned to the hospital in Trento a second time, when she was diagnosed with pharyngitis and then with malaria.
The investigation will look at how the disease was contracted - by a contaminated medical instrument or through a mosquito bite - and whether the correct protocols were followed, the sources said.
The girl, the daughter of an Italian couple resident in Trento, had reportedly never been to a country where malaria is a problem.
Prosecutors have asked to receive Zago's medical records from Portogruaro hospital.
Several human rights organizations are assessing possible legal action against two Italian newspapers that ran front-page headlines on Wednesday accusing migrants of bringing disease to Italy.
Social networks are awash in criticism of Libero and Il Tempo, right-wing and conservative newspapers that used their front pages to accuse migrants of Zago's death.
Libero's front-page headline translates as "After Poverty, Now They Are Bringing Disease" and another article within it was entitled "Immigrants Suffering from Deadly Diseases Spread Infection...".
The Il Tempo headline translates as "Here is the Migrant's Disease".
The Articolo 21, A Mano Disarmata, Progetto Diritto, Rete Nobavaglio rights groups and the Italian branch of Amnesty International have asked their legal teams to look into possibly reporting the publications to the judiciary for violation of a 1993 law that prohibits gestures, actions and slogans linked to neo-Fascism that intend to incite violence and discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion or nationality, as well as Article 658 of the Criminal Code on spreading alarm among the public.
The abovementioned "headlines and summaries take their cue from a hypothesis that has not been proven in any way," the associations noted, "and cannot be considered 'opinions', since they report events that never happened as if they were fact. As citizens even before professionals in the field of information, we are for freedom of expression as protected by Article 21 of our constitution." "However, we are also compliance with the law," they added, "and above all we are for the free information that protects the main asset of democracy: the truth. We ask all citizens, associations and political parties to join us in this fight for civilization." Much lively discussion has been seen on Facebook on the issue, with many disputing the theory of how the disease was transmitted.
"I am against censorship and denunciations. My freedom is theirs," TgLa7 director Enrico Mentana said. "But this morning's headlines in Libero and Il Tempo are very far from the truth and incite readers to ugly thoughts".
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