DEATH PROVES THEORY

Press, Volume XCVII, Issue 28774, 20 December 1958, Page 11

DEATH PROVES THEORY

Donor’s Blood Contaminated

HOBART, December 19.

A rare organism growing in the cork of a bottle of antiseptic was blamed at an inquest for the death of a young woman who died after a blood transfusion at Burnie General Hospital on October 16.

The Coroner (Mr L. C. P. Wilson) found that every possible care had beer, taken, and the transfusion had been properly administered in the course of necessary treatment. The dsad woman was Mrs Valda Caville Robertson, aged 23, of Burnie. The Coroner said the immediate cause of death was septicaemia, caused by blood which had become accidentally contaminated while being obtained from a donor on October 8. It had been transferred from the cork of the antiseptic bottle to a bottled sample of blood when antiseptic was swabbed on the arm of the donor.

Dr. Thomas Giles Ingram, medical officer in charge of the Red Cross blood transfusion service in Burnie, said the investigations had proved a theory expounded by two Adelaide scientists in a recent issue of the British Medical Journal. The scientists had declared that bacteria could lie and grow in the living organic matter of a bark cork even though the cork was attached to a bottle of antiseptic.