Hyderabad: An inquiry committee which was formed to probe into the five maternal deaths that occurred in Niloufer hospital has come to conclusion that the cause of the deaths was use of substandard drugs and not due to the hospital’s negligence.
Substandard intravenous fluids, especially those containing dextrose, are named as the cause of the deaths.
Dr Deepraj Singh, a member of the enquiry committee, said: “Substandard drugs have been supplied to all hospitals. This has led to adverse effect on patients in Niloufer because pregnant women have low immunity and C-sections require more IV fluids than other patients. Following our report, the drug suppliers have been changed. If it was the hospitals negligence, more deaths would have occurred but no more cases have been reported after the change.” The inquiry committee found that drugs from Haseeb Pharmaceuticals were substandard.
But Yusuf Badar, the director of Haseeb Pharmaceuticals said: “Our drugs were proclaimed to be of substandard quality by Niloufer in 2016 and they supposedly stopped purchase of our drugs. So there is no question of our drugs being used earlier this year. Moreover, our drugs have been certified to be of standard quality by the Central Drug Authority in Kolkata so I am sure that they could not have led to any deaths.”
The inquiry committee also declared the operation theatres to be sterile and so ruled out infection from this source as cause for the deaths. The report states that the Drug Control Authority of Telangana failed to submit its final report to the committee and this has opened up a lot of questions.
Mujtaba Hasan, founder of a city based NGO says, “The possible cause of death stated in the report is without any evidence from the Drug Control Authority, which according to the report is pending. Then how can the cause of deaths be attributed to poor quality of drugs?”
The members of the NGO say that the case sheets of the deaths point towards medical negligence and that the bleeding patients were left unattended for a long time leading to their deaths.
