35 children die in hospital — lack of oxygen blamed
LUCKNOW, India — Parents of at least 35 children who have died in a state-run hospital in northern India over the past three days have alleged that the fatalities were due to the lack of a sufficient oxygen supply in the children’s ward.
District Magistrate Rajiv Rautela said Saturday that the deaths of the children being treated for different ailments at the Baba Raghav Das Medical College Hospital in Gorakhpur city in Uttar Pradesh state were due to natural causes. He denied that an insufficient oxygen supply led to their deaths.
Parents said that the oxygen supply to the ward ran out Thursday night and that patients’ families were given self-inflating bags to help the children breathe.
“That’s the time when the death of the children peaked,” said Mritunjaya Singh, whose 7-month-old son was admitted to the hospital and was not among the dead.
The state government has ordered an investigation.
Prashant Trivedi, the state’s top health official, acknowledged that there was a problem in the pipeline supplying oxygen.
“But the situation was managed through oxygen cylinders,” Trivedi said. “The hospital administration has enough supply of cylinders in its stock. So the report about death of children because of oxygen issue is false.”
The parents said the company that supplies oxygen to the hospital had earlier threatened to stop the distribution of oxygen unless the government paid its long-overdue bills.
Rautela said that the hospital owed $106,000 to the company, but added that it had adequate numbers of oxygen cylinders.
Parmatma Gautam, whose 1-month-old nephew, Roshan, died when the oxygen supply stopped, said the hospital authorities and the district administration were trying to cover up their failure to pay the bills on time.
“We saw our baby struggling to breathe, and we couldn’t do anything,” Gautam said as tears flowed down his cheek.
The family had rushed the newborn to the hospital on Aug. 9 because he had a high fever.
“We are now going back with his body,” Gautam sobbed.
The federal health ministry sent a team of specialists to the hospital Saturday to verify what caused the deaths at the facility, which provides health care to a vast swath of Uttar Pradesh and neighboring Bihar state.
Opposition leaders took to social media to blame Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, which rules the state, for its neglect and indifference to people’s health. Biswajeet Banerjee is an Associated Press writer.