Second autopsy confirms starvation
NEWDELHI: A preliminary report of the second autopsy conducted at Guru Teg Bahadur Hospital has confirmed that the death of three sisters in east Delhi’s Mandawali area was caused by starvation.
The children — aged two, four and eight years — were taken to Lal Bahadur Shastri (LBS) Hospital on Tuesday, where they were declared dead on arrival.
An autopsy conducted later found that the children had died of starvation.
To confirm the findings, the bodies were sent to GTB hospital, the largest government hospital in trans-yamuna.
The hospital constituted a medical board to conduct a second autopsy, which is likely to submit its final findings to the police on Friday.
The second autopsy found that the stomach and the intestines of all three children were completely empty.
“This can happen only if a person has not eaten for more than a day because food usually passes from the stomach in two hours and from the intestines in nine hours. But looking at the condition of the organs and other factors, we think the children had not had a proper meal in 14 or 15 days,” said a senior doctor on condition of anonymity.
The report also said depleted fat reservoirs and high levels of ketones, which are byproducts of the body breaking down fat for energy that occurs when carbohydrate intake is low, indicated that the children were starving.
The autopsy report of Lal Bahadur Shastri Hospital said that vital organs like the liver and the kidneys were pale, which indicates anaemia or shortage of oxygen-carrying haemoglobin in the blood.
The report also shows that the gallbladder was full of bile, which is released into the stomach to digest fat in food. “This too concurs with the LBS finding that the death was due to starvation. When fat is consumed, bile is secreted from the gallbladder into the stomach for digestion. But if there is no fat intake, the gallbladder will not release the bile,” said the doctor.
Deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia, however, claimed that the girls had eaten some food on Monday.
“One of them went to school and had mid-day meal provided there. Others also ate some food at home. The magisterial inquiry will bring out the facts in the case. Be it due to starvation, poverty or illness, the deaths is the biggest failure of our system,” the minister added.
The mother of the children is suspected to be mentally unstable and has been admitted for evaluation at Delhi government’s mental health hospital, Institute of Human Behaviour and allied Sciences (IHBAS).
“Her condition is being evaluated. We need to take care of her physical ailments first and then look at whether she has mental retardation (below average mental development) or mental health ailment,” said a senior doctor from the hospital.