Eight deaths linked to oxygen mix-up at Italian hospital

http://www.guardian.co.uk/italy/stor...074070,00.html

A face mask which emitted massive and fatal doses of anaesthetic gas instead of oxygen has been blamed for the sudden death of a 73-year-old patient at an Italian coronary unit and is suspected to have killed another seven patients at the unit since it opened 17 days ago.
Doctors at Castellaneta hospital in Puglia admitted that the tubes supplying oxygen and anaesthetic gas to the ward had been switched in error, causing the death on Friday of Cosima Ancona, who was being treated for a minor heart arrhythmia.

On April 20, just hours after TV crews and dignitaries left the ceremony for the opening of the new ward, two patients were already dead.

The gas mix-up is the latest of a series of health scandals to surface in Italy recently. In January a 16-year-old girl in Calabria went into a coma and died after a power cut struck the operating theatre in which she was having her appendix out. Police in January raided Europe's largest hospital, Umberto Primo in Rome, after rubbish and dog excrement was found in tunnels used to transport patients.

In February three patients at a Florence hospital were given transplanted organs from a HIV-positive donor due to a labelling error.

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