Thursday, May 21, 2015

British nurse sentenced to life for killing two patients and poisoning 20 more.

Alex Schadenberg
By Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director - Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

A British nurse was sentenced to life in prison (35 years before parole) for killing 2 people and poisoning 20 others.

Victorino Chua, a nurse from Stepping Hill Hospital in Stockport UK, was convicted on Tuesday of killing Tracey Arden (44) and Derek Weaver (83) and poisoning 20 more people by intentionally putting lethal amounts of insulin into Saline bags to poison patients. Grant Misell, who was one of the 20 poisoned patients who survived was brain damaged from the insulin poisoning.

Investigators also learned that Chua was not a qualified nurse.

Tracey Arden, Derek Weaver and Grant Misell
According to the Daily Telegraph Justice Oppenshaw stated in sentencing Chau that:

"It is a striking, sinister and truly wicked feature of the case, he did not personally administer contaminated products directly to most of these patients but having left saline bags contaminated with insulin he did not know which nurse would unwittingly collect them and still less to which patient the nurse would then unwittingly administer the poison. 
"It is as if he left it to fate to decide who would be the victim."
The euthanasia lobby claims that legalizing euthanasia or assisted suicide decreases the number of deaths without request by physicians. The facts do not back up their claim.

Cases where a doctor or a nurse intentionally cause the death of a patient is not uncommon.

A recent NEJM study on the practice of euthanasia in the Flanders region of Belgium found that 1.7% of all deaths (more than 1000 deaths) were hastened without explicit request in 2013.

The Lancet study analyzing the Netherlands euthanasia experience found that there were 310 hastened deaths without explicit consent in 2010 in the Netherlands.

Several cases have been reported in the media in the past such as the death of David Gray, in which the doctor received a nine month suspended sentence for negligence causing death.

Several medical professionals have intentionally killed patients, such as: Dr. Harold Shipman, Charles Cullen, Dr Virginia Soares de Souza, Aino Nykopp-Koski and Dr. Michael Swango.

It is not safe to give doctors, or others, the right in law to cause death of their patients.

1 comment:

gadfly said...

I understand that the euthanasia activist Charles Curran, also a nurse, did the same thing to his patients. He created a death lottery with anonymity and patients died as a result. That story is covered in 'The Good Nurse', a book of a few years back.