Death Due to pneumonia in young adults : A post-mortem experience from the Department of legal medicine, Kacyiru hospital, Kigali-Rwanda

Pneumonia-related deaths in young healthy adults are not as frequent as in children below fie years or adults aged 65 years and above the two commonly affected groups. Various data clearly support this assumption. Therefore, young people within the 5 to 44 years age group dying in unclear circumstances are fist thought to have died of other causes such as sudden cardiac disease, drug intoxication or bodily injuries, rather than pneumonia. In this report, we present two cases of young adults who were found dead in unknown circumstances. The manner of death in both cases was initially presumed as unnatural by the police, but following detailed forensic examination, defiitive conclusions of death due to pneumonia were made.