Death of model with storybook life illustrates rapid spread of drug-resistant bacteria

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (AP) — One month ago, 20-year-old beauty queen Mariana Bridi was living the dream of many young Brazilian women, trading her striking good looks for a modeling career that promised to lift her family out of poverty.

Then she contracted a seemingly ordinary urinary tract infection. The bacteria spread quickly and inexorably through her body, proving to be extremely drug resistant. In a desperate bid to save her life, doctors amputated her hands and feet. But by Saturday she was dead.

Bridi’s Web site says she began modeling at age 14 with the hope of giving “a dignified life to her parents.”

Her father is a taxi driver and her mother a house cleaner.

By age 18, she was well on her way: In 2007 and 2008, she was a finalist in the Brazilian stage of the Miss World pageant.

Her Web site said next month she was to participate in the second stage of a modeling competition held in Sao Paulo by Dilson Stein, the Brazilian model scout who discovered supermodel Gisele Bundchen.

Last year, she took fourth in the Face of the Universe competition in South Africa and she had won bikini competitions across the globe.

Half a dozen memorial groups on Facebook had already sprung up just hours after her death. On Bridi’s own page on Orkut — the most popular Web social networking site in Brazil — dozens of memorial messages were left.

The course of her illness was swift.

In late December, she fell ill, and doctors initially diagnosed her as having kidney stones.

She returned to a hospital Jan. 3 in septic shock from the infection that would force doctors to amputate first her feet, then her hands.

Doctors said there was little they could do but pump drugs into her and hope for the best.

It was a nightmare scenario: Her body did not react to the latest and most potent drugs while the bacteria in her veins spread from head to toe.