Oxygen shortage didn’t cause Gorakhpur deaths: Central team

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, August 16

The Central team deputed to look into the recent child deaths in Gorakhpur is learnt to have ruled out stoppage of liquid oxygen supply to ill children as the cause of death.

Dr Harish Chellani, paediatrician at Safdarjung Hospital and one of the members of the team, today said the lack of oxygen did not cause the deaths. He did not elaborate on what led to the death of children.

The team also comprised Dr NK Agarwal, Deputy Commissioner, Immunisation, Health Ministry, and Dr Sushma Nangya of Lady Hardinge College. They were tight-lipped about the determinants of tragic deaths of several children at Gorakhpur’s BRD Hospital amid possibilities of hospital overload to have been noted as the reason for deaths.

The Central team is said to have looked at number of children per one emergency bed in the hospital besides other causative factors linked to deaths, including unclean surroundings. Earlier, UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath also ruled out the lack of oxygen as the reason for fatalities.

Former health minister and senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad, meanwhile, asked today as to why the UP government changed the contractor supplying oxygen cylinders to the hospital recently. “The contractor was changed from someone in Gorakhpur to someone in Allahabad. Why?” Azad asked.

CONG TO DONATE 10 AMBULANCES

• UP Congress Committee president Raj Babbar and other party workers on Wednesday courted arrest to protest the death of children in Gorakhpur
• Before they were taken away by the police they sat in front of Mahatma Gandhi’s statue at GPO Park for two hours in protest
• Babbar said the Congress would donate 10 ambulances to the BRD Medical College that would be used to ferry sick children showing signs of Acute Encephalitis Syndrome (AES) to the hospital from remote rural areas