Russian hospital personnel will be prosecuted for the "horrific" death of a patient who was mistakenly injected with formaldehyde, which is used to embalm corpses, an official says.
Members of a medical team blamed for the death of Yekaterina Fedyayeva have been fired from their jobs at a hospital in the Volga River city of Ulyanovsk and will be tried, regional Health Minister Rashid Abdullov said on April 9.
After a successful surgery on March 15, a nurse misread the label of a container of fluid and Fedyayeva, 28, was injected with a large amount of formaldehyde instead of a saline solution, Abdullov said.
Staffers concealed the mistake for 24 hours, which helped ensure the "tragic end of this horrific ordeal," he said.
"Urgent steps should have been taken. The information should have been reported immediately.... Time was wasted," Abdullov said. "The medical team was fired due to the tragedy. They will surely face trial."
Doctors in Ulyanovsk tried to save Fedyayeva for four days and then decided to transfer her to a top hospital in Moscow, where her condition improved somewhat, but she died of multiple organ failure on April 5. She was buried on April 7.
The mistake occurred when Fedyayeva was recovering from an operation to remove an ovarian cyst, Russian media reports said.
They said one of the hospital staff members who has been fired was its chief doctor, Vladimir Dyomin.
Investigators are treating the death as a case of fatal negligence, which is punishable by up to three years in prison.
Formaldehyde is infused into the veins of the dead to prevent decomposition.