Chennai: Contending that the death of the 11 newborn babies at the Dharmapuri government medical college hospital last week, could not have been due to natural causes, state BJP president Dr Tamilisai Soundararajan, who is a doctor by profession, demanded that the state government come out with a ‘white paper’ on the deaths and on the conditions of the GH.
“We cannot accept the claim of the government that the deaths were due to natural causes. It (death of 11 newborns in a span of four days) is a serious issue. It cannot be ignored or taken lightly. The health minister should resign, owning moral responsibility for the deaths of the infants at Dharmapuri government hospital,” she told reporters here on Wednesday.
Eleven babies had died between November 14 and 17 at the neo-natal intensive care unit of the GH and a special medical team, including paediatric experts, was sent to Dharmapuri to provide treatment to the infants.
As a doctor herself she could say that there could have been numerous other factors, including medicare or lack of equipment, that could have been responsible. “This is not a problem of Dharmapuri alone. This is a problem of TN. The government must come out with a white paper on the issue,” she said. The senior BJP leader will visit Dharmapuri on Thursday and interact with the people, particularly those affected.
Dr Tamilisai said that she refused to accept Chief Minister Panneerselvam’s statement on Tuesday that the cause of the death was ‘natural’ and not ‘due to medical negligence’. She hit out at health minister Vijayabaskar for visiting the GH four days after the incident and demanded his resignation on moral grounds.
The CM while ruling out medical negligence, had said that the young age of mothers, short interval between the pregnancies, low birth weight and pre-term delivery were the factors contributing to the death of the babies.
