CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas, Sept. 17 (UPI) -- A 13-year-old Texas boy has died of an allergic reaction to ant bites he suffered while playing football last week, his mother says.
Josephine Limon of Corpus Christi says her son, Cameron Espinosa, died early Monday, KRIS-TV, Corpus Christi, reported. Her son, an eighth-grader at Haas Middle School, had been bitten during a game last Thursday.
All athletic and extracurricular activities at the school were canceled for the week. His funeral will be Thursday.
The TV station said Limon has hired an attorney, Thomas J. Henry, who said there were no paramedics at the game when the teenager collapsed. He says the boy told a coach he had been bitten by ants and was told to wash them off with water.
But Cameron soon started having trouble breathing and experienced shock of some sort. Henry said someone started performing CPR and emergency personnel were summoned.
A Driscoll Children's Hospital representative told KIII-TV, Corpus Christi, Cameron was in a medically induced coma last week in hopes of reducing swelling in his brain.
"I think that this incident and the time delay in responding to a child in critical condition appears to be lacking in case of timeliness," Henry said. "I also have some concerns about the district and how the district deals with allergic reaction in children, when children don't have a known allergic reaction history."
Hector Salinas, a school board member, believes coaches should have done more after it was discovered the field had trouble with fire ants.
"If it's full of ants the way they say, and there was a lot of ant piles all over, then you know what, maybe the game shouldn't have gone on," Salinas told KRIS-TV.
