5 die: fluid suspect

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32861, 9 March 1972, Page 15

5 die: fluid suspect

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright) LONDON, Mar. 8. An intensive search is being made throughout Britain for more than 500 bottles of intravenous fluid, believed to be contaminated, after the deaths of five hospital patients who were given the fluid as liquid food.

Government health officials last night appealed to hospitals, doctors and chemists not to use, in any circumstances, a batch of dextrose solution issued by a Liverpool firm in May of last year. Of the 660 bottles involved only 156 have so far been accounted for.

A doctor had given a warning that a batch of bottles of the fluid, used as a dripfood for post-operative patients and others who' cannot eat, was dangerously contaminated. A spokesman for the manufacturers, the Evans Medical Company, said: “We do not know what the fault is. We shall have to wait until it is chemically analysed.” At an inquest yesterday on one of the five patients—four men and a woman—

who died in a hospital in Plymouth, a pathologist said: “Information was given to me that the batch of transfusion fluid supplied to the hospital was dangerously contaminated.” As the nation-wide hunt for the missing bottles began, a hospital spokesman said that each of the patients who died had been given an

infusion of the dextrose solution, but there was nothing to say that these people did not die from other causes.” He added that another man and woman were thought to be affected by the solution; one of them was seriously iIL

A joint statement issued by the Health Department and Evans Medical says that the manufacturers have taken all possible steps to ensure that any bottles remaining from the batch concerned are returned to them, but that an unknown number may have been used since the batch was issued.

The statement urges all hospital pharmacies, wholeside chemists, doctors and others who have any bottles of the batch to return them immediately to the manufacturers.