Updated: 05/12/2011 05:56:18 AM PDT
BERKELEY -- Four months after his wife died mysteriously in a Thai hospital, a Berkeley man is still trying to find out what caused her death.
Soraya Vorster Pandola, 33, a Berkeley High graduate, had worked as a tour guide in Thailand every winter since 2005, and had led Americans on trips to at least a dozen countries over the past decade, said her husband, Tony Pandola, 29, of Berkeley.
In early January, she and a guide colleague were wrapping up a five-week trip in Thailand when they dined on sushi and seaweed at a restaurant in Chiang Mai. They went home and went to bed at a guesthouse outside the city, where Vorster Pandola had stayed many times, her husband said.
About 1 a.m., both women woke up violently ill, and spent the next eight hours vomiting. They called a friend who took them to a hospital.
The colleague, a Seattle woman, recovered, but Vorster Pandola slipped into a coma. Her lungs and kidneys failed and her heart became inflamed. Within a few hours of her husband's arrival from Brazil, where he had been working, she died.
An autopsy in Thailand was inconclusive, and Thai authorities were not helpful in Pandola's request for a further probe into the death. He went home to Berkeley.
In February, he heard about the death of New Zealand backpacker Sarah Carter, 23, who had stayed at a hotel in Chiang Mai. She had become violently ill, with the same symptoms as Vorster Pandola, and died. After that came
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the deaths of five more people from different countries, who had all stayed or visited the Downtown Inn in Chiang Mai, a tourist destination about 430 miles north of Bangkok.
A New Zealand television news program sent reporters to the hotel to pose as guests and turned up in a room small traces of an insecticide, chlorpyrifos, a toxic chemical that is used to kill bedbugs. The toxic substance has not been definitively linked to the deaths.
But Vorster Pandola never stayed at that hotel, her husband said. Now, Pandola is still hoping an investigation by the Thai Ministry of Public Health, along with consulting and lab testing by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, will uncover what killed his wife. A CDC representative is coming to the Bay Area next week to interview him, he said.
"We've lost seven people who have died from a mysterious illness in Thailand. We are being patient and taking confidence in the fact that the proper investigation is happening,'' he said. "I'm hoping something can be resolved so travelers feel safe
Topic: No more visit to Chiangma, Thailand or LAOS... (Read 7142 times)