Ewha hospital raided over newborns' deaths
Investigators search Ewha Womans University Medical Center in western Seoul, Tuesday. / Yonhap
By Jung Min-ho
Police searched Ewha Womans University Medical Center in western Seoul Tuesday following the deaths of four premature babies in its neonatal intensive care unit last week.
Thirteen police officers and officials from the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) searched the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit (ICU) and computer center, confiscating medical devices and records.
Investigators took incubators, drug-administering devices and prescription histories for examination because of suspicions that the hospital violated basic rules when treating the babies.
The National Forensic Service (NFS) will examine the devices to determine as part of its efforts to find the cause of their deaths and what made them sick in the first place. Results are expected in about one month.
The babies died Sunday within a two-hour period due to an unknown cause.
More than 10 hospital officials, including two doctors and five nurses on duty that day, will be summoned for questioning soon. “We will question everyone who was at the scene at the time,” a police officer said.
On Monday, the KCDC said it conducted blood tests and found Citrobacter freundii in the bodies of three of the babies. This is a gram-negative type of bacteria which is commonly found in healthy human intestines but can often cause respiratory, blood-related or urinary problems in immune-compromised patients, such as premature babies.
The KCDC also said the overuse of antibiotics may be a contributing factor to their deaths, given that the bacteria are suspected of being antibiotic-resistant.
The center is now carrying out additional tests to verify its suspicions.
Some parents of the babies accused the hospital of paying little attention to sanitary control in the facility.
Some claimed that they saw bugs, including a cockroach, in the ICU. Others said baby bottles and pacifiers were not properly cleaned before use.
At the time of the incident, there were 16 babies in the ICU. The rest of the babies have been transferred to another hospital following the deaths. They have not shown any noticeable symptoms.
The bereaved families said the infants all had bloated bellies and difficulty in breathing before they died.
Experts have mentioned bacterial infection and failure of medical devices as possible causes of the deaths.
The NFS has carried out postmortem examinations, but released a statement saying that it needed more time to conduct a detailed analysis to determine the cause of the deaths, adding its preliminary assessment was unclear.