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| Fredie Blom may have been the world's oldest man |
A 116-year-old survivor of the 1918 Spanish Flu
believed to be among the world's oldest people died Saturday in South Africa,
his family said.
Born on May 8 1904, Fredie Blom had "lived this
long because of God's grace," he told AFP this year.
Guinness World Records lists the oldest currently
living man as Briton Bob Weighton, aged 112, but South African media have
described Blom as "unofficially" the world's oldest.
Blom's entire family was wiped out by the Spanish Flu
pandemic when he was just a teenager.
But he himself survived and went on to raise the three
children of his wife of 46 years, Jeanette, as his own, becoming grandfather to
five over the years.
"Two weeks ago oupa (grandfather) was still
chopping wood," family spokesman Andre Naidoo told AFP fondly, recalling
the old man using a 4 pound hammer.
"He was a strong man, full of pride," he
added.
But within 3 days, his family saw him shrink
"from a big man to a small person".
Born in the rural town of Adelaide, tucked near the
Great Winterberg mountain range of South Africa's Eastern Cape province, Blom
died at Tygerberg Hospital in Cape Town.
His death was "not a COVID death at all, it's
normal natural death," Naidoo said in reference to the coronavirus
pandemic..
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