Baby mispronounced dead and left in cooler for five hours dies

Palestinian News.Net
Tuesday 19th August, 2008 (IANS)

A premature baby girl who had caused shock in Israel when she suddenly showed signs of life after spending more than five hours in a morgue cooler died early Tuesday in the northern Israeli hospital where she was born, Israel Radio reported.

The gynaecologist who had helped deliver the 610-gram baby, born Monday in the fifth month of her mother's pregnancy, had mispronounced the girl stillborn because he had found no pulse.

Staff at the hospital in Nahariya near the Israel-Lebanon border then sent the baby to a cooler at the hospital's cryogenic laboratory, where she spent more than five hours, only for her mother to discover signs of life when she was taken out of the cooler shortly before her scheduled funeral.

The baby had grabbed her grandmother's finger and moved. Her parents, who had asked to look at her one last time, were shocked, and doctors rushed her to the hospital's neonatal intensive care unit.

While the father, Ali Majdub, said the doctors had been 'negligent in the speed with which they pronounced my daughter's death', the hospital's deputy administrator Moshe Daniel spoke of a 'miracle' Monday.

'In medicine, when we see something like this, we call it a medical miracle, but at this point, we do not have an explanation,' he told Channel 2 News.

Rami Moshonov, a senior gynaecologist at a Tel Aviv hospital, told the television station that it was possible that the cold from the cooler had slowed the baby's metabolism sufficiently for her to stay alive.

But experts had said already Monday that the baby's chances for survival were less than one in five. She died at 5.15 a.m. Tuesday.

The baby's mother had checked into the hospital five days earlier with severe pain and haemorrhaging.

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