Bloodthirsty Liberal

Saving preemies is so expensive

And the beauty of this is that the Brits don’t put this death, or others like it, into their statistics.

‘Doctors told me it was against the rules to save my premature baby’

By Vanessa Allen and Andrew Levy
Last updated at 7:58 AM on 09th September 2009

Doctors left a premature baby to die because he was born two days too early, his devastated mother claimed yesterday.

Sarah Capewell begged them to save her tiny son, who was born just 21 weeks and five days into her pregnancy - almost four months early.

They ignored her pleas and allegedly told her they were following national guidelines that babies born before 22 weeks should not be given medical treatment.

Miss Capewell, 23, said doctors refused to even see her son Jayden, who lived for almost two hours without any medical support.

She said he was breathing unaided, had a strong heartbeat and was even moving his arms and legs, but medics refused to admit him to a special care baby unit.

Medics allegedly told her that they would have tried to save the baby if he had been born two days later, at 22 weeks.

In fact, the medical guidelines for Health Service hospitals state that babies should not be given intensive care if they are born at less than 23 weeks.

The guidance, drawn up by the Nuffield Council, is not compulsory but advises doctors that medical intervention for very premature children is not in the best interests of the baby, and is not ’standard practice’.

James Paget Hospital in Norfolk refused to comment on the case but said it was not responsible for setting the guidelines relating to premature births.

A trust spokesman said: ‘Like other acute hospitals, we follow national guidance from the British Association of Perinatal Medicine regarding premature births.’

Miss Capewell, who has had five miscarriages, said the guidelines had robbed her son of a chance of life.

Short life: Miss Capewell’s son Jayden died two hours after he was born at James Paget Hospital in Gorleston, Norfolk, in October 2008

She said: ‘When he was born, he put out his arms and legs and pushed himself over.

A midwife said he was breathing and had a strong heartbeat, and described him as a “little fighter”.

I kept asking for the doctors but the midwife said, “They won’t come and help, sweetie. Make the best of the time you have with him”.’

She cuddled her child and took precious photos of him, but he died in her arms less than two hours after his birth.

Miss Capewell, who has a five-year-old daughter Jodie, went into labour in October last year at 21 weeks and four days after suffering problems during her pregnancy.

She said she was told that because she had not reached 22 weeks, she was not allowed injections to try to stop the labour, or a steroid injection to help to strengthen her baby’s lungs.

Instead, doctors told her to treat the labour as a miscarriage, not a birth, and to expect her baby to be born with serious deformities or even to be still-born.

She told how she begged one paediatrician, ‘You have got to help’, only for the man to respond: ‘No we don’t.’

As her contractions continued, a chaplain arrived at her bedside to discuss bereavement and planning a funeral, she claims.

She said: ‘I was sitting there, reading this leaflet about planning a funeral and thinking, this is my baby, he isn’t even born yet, let alone dead.’

After his death she even had to argue with hospital officials for her right to receive birth and death certificates, which meant she could give her son a proper funeral.

She was shocked to discover that another child, born in the U.S. at 21 weeks and six days into her mother’s pregnancy, had survived.

Amillia Taylor was born in Florida in 2006 and celebrated her second birthday last October. She is the youngest premature baby to survive.

Miss Capewell said: ‘I could not believe that one little girl, Amillia Taylor, is perfectly healthy after being born in Florida in 2006 at 21 weeks and six days.

‘Thousands of women have experienced this. The doctors say the babies won’t survive but how do they know if they are not giving them a chance?’

Miss Capewell has won the support of Labour MP Tony Wright, who has backed her call for a review of the medical guidelines. He said: ‘When a woman wants to give the best chance to her baby, they should surely be afforded that opportunity.’
What the medical guidelines say…

Guidance limiting care of the most premature babies provoked outrage when it was published three years ago.

Experts on medical ethics advised doctors not to resuscitate babies born before 23 weeks in the womb, stating that it was not in the child’s ‘best interests’.

The guidelines said: ‘If gestational age is certain and less than 23+0 (i.e at 22 weeks) it would be considered in the best interests of the baby, and standard practice, for resuscitation not to be carried out.’

Medical intervention would be given for a child born between 22 and 23 weeks only if the parents requested it and only after discussion about likely outcomes.

The rules were endorsed by the British Association of Perinatal Medicine and are followed by NHS hospitals.

The association said they were not meant to be a ’set of instructions’, but doctors regard them as the best available advice on the treatment of premature babies.

I don’t know… it strikes me as a very barbaric practice to watch a human being die, to deny medical help. But it does save money.

- Aggie

Last night I posted the story about the British “death pathway”. Always a student of history, I dug up an older example of The Circle of Life from British society:

- Aggie

Look at medicine in Britain

In a letter to The Daily Telegraph, a group of experts who care for the terminally ill claim that some patients are being wrongly judged as close to death.

Under NHS guidance introduced across England to help doctors and medical staff deal with dying patients, they can then have fluid and drugs withdrawn and many are put on continuous sedation until they pass away.

But this approach can also mask the signs that their condition is improving, the experts warn.

As a result the scheme is causing a “national crisis” in patient care, the letter states. It has been signed palliative care experts including Professor Peter Millard, Emeritus Professor of Geriatrics, University of London, Dr Peter Hargreaves, a consultant in Palliative Medicine at St Luke’s cancer centre in Guildford, and four others.

“Forecasting death is an inexact science,”they say. Patients are being diagnosed as being close to death “without regard to the fact that the diagnosis could be wrong.

“As a result a national wave of discontent is building up, as family and friends witness the denial of fluids and food to patients.”

The warning comes just a week after a report by the Patients Association estimated that up to one million patients had received poor or cruel care on the NHS.

The scheme, called the Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP), was designed to reduce patient suffering in their final hours.

Developed by Marie Curie, the cancer charity, in a Liverpool hospice it was initially developed for cancer patients but now includes other life threatening conditions.

It was recommended as a model by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice), the Government’s health scrutiny body, in 2004.

It has been gradually adopted nationwide and more than 300 hospitals, 130 hospices and 560 care homes in England currently use the system.

Under the guidelines the decision to diagnose that a patient is close to death is made by the entire medical team treating them, including a senior doctor.

They look for signs that a patient is approaching their final hours, which can include if patients have lost consciousness or whether they are having difficulty swallowing medication.

However, doctors warn that these signs can point to other medical problems.

Patients can become semi-conscious and confused as a side effect of pain-killing drugs such as morphine if they are also dehydrated, for instance.

When a decision has been made to place a patient on the pathway doctors are then recommended to consider removing medication or invasive procedures, such as intravenous drips, which are no longer of benefit.

If a patient is judged to still be able to eat or drink food and water will still be offered to them, as this is considered nursing care rather than medical intervention.

Dr Hargreaves said that this depended, however, on constant assessment of a patient’s condition.

He added that some patients were being “wrongly” put on the pathway, which created a “self-fulfilling prophecy” that they would die.

He said: “I have been practising palliative medicine for more than 20 years and I am getting more concerned about this “death pathway” that is coming in.

Bet they save a lot of money.

Prof Millard said that it was “worrying” that patients were being “terminally” sedated, using syringe drivers, which continually empty their contents into a patient over the course of 24 hours.

In 2007-08 16.5 per cent of deaths in Britain came about after continuous deep sedation, according to researchers at the Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry, twice as many as in Belgium and the Netherlands.

“If they are sedated it is much harder to see that a patient is getting better,” Prof Millard said.

Perhaps that’s the point.

- Aggie

or how football-mad Britain ruined their teams

IN APRIL, the British government decided to recoup revenues lost in the current recession by raising the country’s top income tax rate from 40 percent to 50 percent. That decision turned out to be a body blow to England’s Premier League, the professional soccer association that includes such storied teams as Manchester United and Arsenal.

As Jonathan Last recounts in The Weekly Standard, the hike in the tax rate has led top soccer stars to decline lucrative offers to join or remain with England’s most celebrated teams. Cristiano Ronaldo, Jermaine Pennant, Karim Benzema, and David Villa are among the illustrious players who have spurned the Premier League in order to play in Spain. Why Spain? Because under Spanish tax law, they qualify as “foreign executives,’’ a status that caps their income tax rate at just 24 percent. The tax differential “has become an almost insurmountable advantage for Spanish soccer teams,’’ Last writes, which is why Britain’s domination of European soccer is coming to an end.

Hee hee. I know some Brits that live for football (soccer) but are confirmed socialists. The two halves of their personalities will have to duke it out. Should be more fun that pro-wrestling.

People are willing to pay a lot in taxes, but are not willing to pay half of their earnings in taxes. That is really a tough concept, very nuanced. You can go gray attempting to explain this to the Typical Harvard Undergrad.

Governments delude themselves when they imagine they can easily raise all the money they want by soaking the rich. The rich always have other options. When taxes grow too onerous, high earners can adjust their economic behavior. Some move to Spain to play soccer for La Liga. Others, less glamorously, cut back on their investments, forgo new business opportunities, seek out tax havens, or work fewer hours. The impact is felt not only in lower-than-expected tax revenues, but in lower rates of growth and productivity and job creation. Jobs are disproportionately created by those who have money to invest. “You can’t have employment and despise employers,’’ Massachusetts Senator Paul Tsongas used to say. “No goose, no golden eggs.’’

Ah well, a reasonable discussion on this topic will go nowhere. I’ll just leave you with the fantasy of British football fans becoming livid because Spain has all the good players.

- Aggie

Let’s dump a bunch of dust and pollutants into the atmosphere to help Mother Earth!

To be fair to the Brits (we in Bloodthirstan are nothing if not fair), this is the new craze among the moonbat environmentalists.

THE Royal Society is backing research into simulated volcanic eruptions, spraying millions of tons of dust into the air, in an attempt to stave off climate change.

The society will this week call for a global programme of studies into geo-engineering — the manipulation of the Earth’s climate to counteract global warming — as the world struggles to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

It will suggest in a report that pouring sulphur-based particles into the upper atmosphere could be one of the few options available to humanity to keep the world cool.

Are you old enough to recall acid rain? Guess what the biggest component of acid rain was.

Tick. Tock.

Did you guess sulpher? You win!!!

The ’70s and ’80s were all about eliminating acid rain. The aughts are about bringing it back. Can you imagine all the work that went into cleaning our air being tossed aside? It’s like spending the weekend cleaning your attic and then asking the neighborhood teenagers to have a keg party up there.

We Must Save The World!

- Aggie

The Brits are so funny

What a nutty society. I keep thinking of Monty Python. For some reason, the Cheese Shop skit is stuck in my mind. What twits.

The Met Office has caused a storm of controversy after it was revealed their £30million supercomputer designed to predict climate change is one of Britain’s worst polluters.

The massive machine - the UK’s most powerful computer with a whopping 15 million megabytes of memory - was installed in the Met Office’s headquarters in Exeter, Devon.

It is capable of 1,000 billion calculations every second to feed data to 400 scientists and uses 1.2 megawatts of energy to run - enough to power more than 1,000 homes.
computer

The computer used 1.2 megawatts to run - enough to power 1,000 homes

The machine was hailed as the ‘future of weather prediction’ with the ability to produce more accurate forecasts and produce climate change modelling.

However the Met Office’s HQ has now been named as one of the worst buildings in Britain for pollution - responsible for more than 12,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year.

It says 75 per cent of its carbon footprint is produced by the super computer meaning the machine is officially one of the country’s least green machines.

Britain is truly at the forefront of the war against pollution. Lead On!

- Aggie

“Botched” surgeries performed in Britain, Swedish docs

You thought I was only kidding when I suggested that Swedish surgeons were stealing British body parts?

A hospital which flew in Scandinavian surgeons to reduce waiting times is being sued after it was alleged that one third of the operations carried out were botched.

Surgeons from Sweden, Denmark and Finland were flown into Britain between 2003 and 2006 as part of a £3million scheme to speed up hip and knee replacements.

But concerns were raised about the quality of the work carried out and many patients fear the surgeons were insufficiently trained or skilled.

More than one third of people operated on at Weston-super-Mare General Hospital (WGH), Somerset, had an unsatisfactory result and six legal cases are now being considered.

Terry Heath, 65, who lives with wife Patricia in Bristol, is taking the hospital to court after a botched knee replacement operation left him unable to walk without crutches.

The former Airbus worker said his life has been ‘changed completely’ by the overseas surgeon’s mistake.

Terry said: ‘When I got the phone call about Weston hospital getting Swedish surgeons over to ease waiting lists I said if they are genuine surgeons I will have it done.

Poor guy. This needs to be investigated.

- Aggie

Those British docs… always joking around

Man collapses with ruptured appendix… three weeks after NHS doctors ‘took it out’

By Daniel Bates

After weeks of excruciating pain, Mark Wattson was understandably relieved to have his appendix taken out.

Doctors told him the operation was a success and he was sent home.

But only a month later the 35-year-old collapsed in agony and had to be taken back to Great Western Hospital in Swindon by ambulance.

To his shock, surgeons from the same team told him that not only was his appendix still inside him, but it had ruptured - a potentially fatal complication.

In a second operation it was finally removed, leaving Mr Wattson fearing another organ might have been taken out during the first procedure.

The blunder has left Mr Wattson jobless, as bosses at the shop where he worked did not believe his story and sacked him.

Mr Wattson told of the moment he realised there had been a serious mistake.

‘I was lying on a stretcher in terrible pain and a doctor came up to me and said that my appendix had burst,’ he said.

‘I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I told these people I had my appendix out just four weeks earlier but there it was on the scanner screen for all to see.

‘I thought, “What the hell did they slice me open for in the first place?”

‘I feel that if the surgery had been done correctly in the first place I wouldn’t be in the mess I am today. I’m disgusted by the whole experience.’

Mr Wattson first went under the knife on July 7 after experiencing severe abdominal pain for several weeks. He was discharged but exactly a month later he had to dial 999 after collapsing in agony.

Following the second operation his incision became infected and he was admitted to hospital for a third time for treatment.

He said: ‘I had a temporary job at a sports shop but when I took in two medical certificates saying I had my appendix out twice they didn’t believe me.

‘Now I’m helpless. I can’t go out and find a job, I can’t go to interviews, I can barely walk and am in constant pain. Before the first operation they told me I had to have my appendix removed and when I woke up afterwards they said it had been a complete success.

‘But then I keeled over in agony one month later and when they did some tests at the hospital we could see the appendix was still there on the scans.

‘As far as I was aware they took my appendix out and no one told me any different.

‘I have no idea what they did take out, but I want to find out what went wrong.’

A spokesman for Great Western Hospital confirmed that a representative had met Mr Wattson and that an investigation had been started.

He was unable to confirm what, if anything, was removed in the first operation.

I’d look around for my spleen if I was Mr. Wattson. Or ask the Swedes. Swedish researchers are known to be involved in an experiment involving stolen British spleens. There needs to be an investigation.

- Aggie

Finally

The cheering, flag-waving welcome that the convicted Lockerbie bomber received in Libya after being released from a life sentence was “highly objectionable,” President Barack Obama said Friday.

His spokesman, Robert Gibbs, also criticized the bomber’s reception as “tremendously offensive,” echoing a sense of outrage that senior British leaders also have expressed.

What a relief to know that there is one thing in this world that I can agree with these guys about. I only hope that the Obama administration will grasp the fact that the feelings are identical no matter where in the world terrorism happens. The families hurt every bit as much and the excuses are equally lame.

- Aggie

Maybe, finally, the Israelis are imposing consequences. I’ll give you a taste, and if you’re interested, check out the rest at the link.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s resolute response to a State Department official’s objection to a Jewish building development in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem may actually close a 90-year-old chapter of the Arab-Israeli conflict and bring about a measure of justice. “We cannot accept the idea that Jews will not have the right to live and buy (homes) anywhere in Jerusalem,” Netanyahu said.

For way too long Arab states, terrorist groups and the Palestinian Arabs believed that they could wage “wars of limited liability” first against the Jews of Palestine and then against the State of Israel. They embraced a fantasy that they could unleash attacks with impunity in an attempt to wipe out Israel, convinced that if they were defeated they could return to a status quo ante, or even achieve diplomatically what they couldn’t win on the battlefield. Territories captured by Israel would be returned and not annexed, terrorist leaders would be honored and not condemned, and Jews/Israel would be blamed and never indemnified. Tragically, that fantasy became reality.

The article starts out in 1920, the Balfour Declaration, and gives an overview of world behavior towards Israel and the Jewish people since that time. It is difficult for Israel to stand up to the United stations, but I’m pulling for her.

- Aggie