A mother whose daughter has cerebral palsy wants Aga Khan Hospital to pay Sh12.3 million as special damages for medical negligence, which she said led to the condition.
In her court papers, the mother, who gave birth at Aga Khan in 2010 says the hospital was negligent in treating her child who was born preterm, leading to the child suffering injury and loss.
Court documents say the mother gave birth to twins but one of them died weeks later and the other twin developed complications.
She said the minor was transfused with blood that was infected with Cytomegalovirus (CMV) and was also misdiagnosed with apnea attacks.
She says the hospital also negligently administered aminophylline to the child and these steps led to the minor being taken for stem cell therapy due to delayed neurodevelopment.
The case that was filed in 2021 was mentioned on Wednesday this week and the hearing date was set for May 18.
The mother claims that since 2010 when the child was born, she has incurred more than Sh12 million in medical bills in both Kenya and India due to the alleged negligence at Aga Khan when they treated her child.
In her witness statement filed in court, the mother says the child was born in March 2010, premature at 30 weeks by C-section due to maternal pre-eclampsia. She says the child was admitted to NHDU due to prematurity and respiratory distress.
“The minor was later diagnosed with chronic lung disease. For five months, the minor was on an oxygen machine and was getting high doses of oxygen between one to two litres and sometimes five litres," court papers read.
She says in the course of treatment at Aga Khan, when the baby was found to be severely anaemic, she had seven blood transfusions in the first three weeks of her life, thus contracting CMV.
“The doctors at Aga Khan claimed that they did not have any equipment to screen the transfusion blood and due to that the minor became very sick and nothing seemed to work and she did not respond to any treatment,” she claims.
However, she claims that when the baby’s blood samples were taken to German Medical Centre, the results identified CMV infection and after being prescribed medication the child began improving.
In June that year, the child was diagnosed with apnea attacks by Aga Hospital due to frequent convulsions attacks which they said were as a result of the child being pre-term.
That same month, on June 25, she says the hospital then made a unilateral decision to transfer her child to another hospital on grounds that the parents were unable to afford the bill that had accumulated to Sh2 million.
The mother says she then decided to hire an oxygen machine from Avenue Home Care and discharged her child from Aga Khan Hospital for home care.
In 2011, she claims that a neurologist established that the minor had cerebral palsy and needed long term occupational therapy to be rehabilitated.
She has also narrated her 10-year journey in and out different hospitals including travelling to India for stem cell therapy in 2017. She says doctors there said her daughter got cerebral palsy due to the CMV contracted during blood transfusion.
“In July 2018, the minor underwent second stem cell therapy and she is currently in need of more stem cell, hydro, speech and occupational therapies which the parents cannot afford,” court papers read.
However, Aga Khan has denied the allegations made by the mother, saying the child was born pre-term and thus was susceptible to development of convulsive disorder.
In a witness statement by Dr Roseline Ochieng, the hospital says the mother was admitted to the hospital by her private doctor who is not their staff and at the time, the hospital was only offering nursing, pharmaceutical and equipment support.
On the allegations that the blood used for transfusion was infected with CMV, Dr Ochieng says transmissions of CMV is not only done by way of blood but also direct contact with infectious bodily fluids, such as urine, saliva, tears, semen and breastmilk.
“In fact, CMV can be transferred from an expectant mother’s blood to an unborn baby via the placenta,” Ochieng claims.
Ochieng says it is estimated that 50 per cent to 80 per cent of adults have had CMV and once one contracts it, it stays in one’s body for life and most people with CMV do not get sick and even never know they have it.
“It is highly unlikely that the minor contracted CMV as a result of blood transfusion administered at Aga Khan Hospital,” Ochieng says.
The hospital has also denied that they gave the child five litres of oxygen, saying that’s not the practice and the required amount for a pre-term is 0.5 litres.
On cerebral palsy, the doctor says that the minor was born pre-term by a mother who had been diagnosed with pre-eclampsia, both situations often lead to babies being born while already predisposed to cerebral palsy.
“Studies show that, although all babies are at risk of cerebral palsy, the risk goes up dramatically for very premature babies. About one to two out of 1,000 pre-term babies have cerebral palsy,” Ochieng says.
She further adds that for babies born at less than 28 weeks’ gestation, the risk is 100 out of 1,000 surviving infants.