A PRE-TERM baby girl mistakenly left for dead as a miscarried foetus at Limassol hospital was yesterday fighting for her life with a fifty-fifty chance of survival, doctors said.
The 24-week old premature infant is currently being treated at a hospital in Nicosia after being saved by a hospital cleaner some five hours later, reports said.
Authorities launched investigations into the report, which claimed medical staff had left the miscarried foetus for dead. The hospital vehemently denied the claim. Both the police and the health ministry are conducting investigations.
According to daily Alithia, the 29-year-old Cypriot mother was rushed to hospital last Thursday where she believed she was having a miscarriage.
Staff thought the premature foetus was dead and it was placed along with other discarded medical waste, the report said.
But five hours later a cleaner gathering the material noticed a live baby breathing heavily, Alithia said.
Hospital director Chrysostomos Andronicou denied the claim.
“For God’s sakes, these are big lies,” he told state radio. “The child was not dumped.”
He said the mother went to the emergency room with miscarriage contractions saying she was 18 weeks pregnant but until that moment she had not seen any doctors.
When the child was born, staff noticed that it looked older, he said. “They suspected something was up.”
In medicine, any foetus less than 20-weeks old is not capable of surviving.
“The baby had apnoea – she was not breathing at that moment,” the hospital director said.
Andronicou said the foetus had been put where all premature babies of that age are placed and was being monitored. But he conceded that staff did not expect the baby to survive.
When an 18-week foetus is born it usually takes a few breaths and then dies, he said.
And when the reporter asked if the foetus was left to take these breaths, Andronicou said “yes.”
But when the baby started to breathe the staff “administered first aid,” he added.
A paediatrician tried to intubate but failed and the baby was transferred to Nicosia.
Contrary to the newspaper’s report that suggested the infant was left for five hours, state radio reported yesterday that after the miscarriage, the foetus had been placed on a metal tray next to the operating table where it was found alive by cleaners some 15 minutes later.
The baby is being treated in the Makarios hospital neonatal intensive care unit.
The director of the hospital’s paediatric clinic Andreas Hadjidemetriou said the foetus was 24 to 25 weeks old weighing some 900 grams.
Around 10 babies are born at that same stage in Cyprus every year with the survival rate being between 40 and 50 per cent.
“The percentage for the appearance of serious neurological and other problems of prematureness is high not only in Cyprus but internationally,” Hadjidemetriou said.
He said the infant had been on a ventilator for a few days and now she was breathing through a nose tube. It would me some months before doctors could see how its development would be affected.
“Its general condition is quite good, the child is a stable,” he said.
“We are always optimistic at the intensive care unit but surely we still have a long way before we say we have overcome the dangers.”
Police started investigating the case from the onset, taking statements from the parents and hospital staff yesterday.
The health ministry has launched a separate investigation into the matter.
“I have asked the health services to prepare a detailed report of all the events concerning the specific incident so that I have a clear picture as to what exactly happened,” Health Minister Christos Patsalides said.
