The politician from Pakatan Rakyat should stop using National Service trainee deaths for their own political gain and be sensible. The parents of the trainees are already suffering from the loss, don't increase it. If I am in their shoes, I would really hate this opportunistic politicians who try to gain popularity by making use of other people’s sufferings.

If you think the NS is not beneficial for the nation, a waste of money, then argue against it with facts, not simply using these deaths as an issue. To me, it sounds as though these politicians are waiting for more deaths to happen so that they can prove the current NS authority and the policymakers are irresponsible.

Let’s argue on the syllabus of NS, how it should be done and how to make it more beneficial for the nation. Let’s scrap the NS if it is really not beneficial after a proper study.

No one wants to purposely kill your child. I know the first two NS deaths were the fault of the NS trainers. They failed to control the overzealous boys who had jumped in to the river. The rest of the deaths, well, I really don't know if they were preventable. Would these dead trainees have survived if they were with their parents?

Being a doctor for 10 yrs, I wonder how many emergency department doctors would have diagnosed a toxic megacolon in the casualty department. Personally, I believe I myself would not have been able to and would have given the same medication as what the paramedic had given in the camp. Even if I am stationed at that camp, I still would not have been able to diagnose this until her condition turned worse and by then everyone would be suspecting something was amiss.

If it happened to my own daughter whom I love the most, I guess I would have still failed to prevent it. Stationing a doctor in the NS camp as a death prevention method is simply ridiculous. No doctor will ever take up this job.

There are 100,000 - 200,000 youths per year in NS camps - that is a huge responsibility. That works out to an annual mortality rate of 0.00002 - 0.000001 in this age group. That’s much lower than if these youths were to stay in the house or ride a motorbike on road for which the mortality (death) and morbidity (disablement) rate are very much higher in Malaysia.

I don't mean to be very academic, but then expecting NS camps to not only out-do national death average but on top of that achieve zero death is impossible. This is my personal opinion as a doctor and I guess many in the profession will share this view too.

If you want to blame the camp officials for not bringing in the trainee fast for treatment at a hospital, well, would we had done differently with our child? If the whole nation runs to emergency department every time they have a stomach upset for fear of death, I wonder if all the hospitals could cope?

We can't make NS camps death-proof no matter what we do. No medical examination will prevent death. We have to live in this world with belief. We can't be fearing death to the extent that we stop our children from joining in sports at school, going for jungle trekking, riding a bicycle, taking a bus to school, eating ice cream, learning taekwondo or karate, driving a car, climbing a staircase or even eating roti canai at the roadside stalls. Are we going to station doctors in schools so that deaths can be prevented during extra-curricular activities? A lot of accidents happening during this activities and some may lead to death (it happened many times before!)

For the families of the NS trainees who died, we should be helping them to overcome their grief. Bringing then about and holding press conferences is just not the way. Convincing them to sue the government will only prolong their bereavement. For them, the policies of the government does not matter. There is only one question that needs to be answered - was the death preventable?

We should not tolerate if the NS camp officers were negligent. But if indeed there toxic megacolon, then let the doctor who saw the trainee last to explain to the parents. Let he or she explain to the parents that it is a rare condition that is very difficult to be detected or diagnosed early and even if it is diagnosed, the possibilities are that their daughter could not have been saved..

Let them understand that this could have happened even if she had been in their house and this could have happened to anyone. Let them slowly accept the nature of this without spending the rest of their lives thinking that some one had killed their daughter. Losing their daughter is already a trauma that takes a lifetime to forget, don't add to their misery by trying to be a hero looking for the murderer who never existed.