Italian police officers arrested a nurse on suspicion of causing the death of 13 patients in a hospital in Piombino, Tuscany.
It is an arrest which makes a lot of noise on the other side of the Alps. The Italian riflemen have just arrested a nurse suspected of having killed several patients in a Tuscan health establishment, between 2014 and 2015, the transalpine authorities said on Thursday.
The local daily Il Tirreno explain that Fausta Bonino, 56, is said to have killed 13 patients, all aged between 61 and 88, who were hospitalized in the anesthesia and resuscitation department of the Hospital of Piombino (province of Livorno). These patients were certainly in serious states, but not desperate, according to the same source.
She allegedly killed them by giving them large doses of an anticoagulant drug that caused severe bleeding. In some patients, medical examiners have even detected levels of anticoagulant ten times the recommended dose in their body. Free until Wednesday evening, she was arrested on her return from Paris where her son lives.
A depressed woman
And the police operation made the highest authorities in the country react. In a statement, the Minister of Health, Beatrice Lorenzin, said that “in the ranking of horrors, we have reached another peak of human misery”. The politician also stressed that “this is not the first time that serial murders have been discovered, with a nurse-murderer as the protagonist.” “These people do not respect any deontology, any medical ethics, whereas they should always think about the well-being of the patients”, she concluded.
To explain these actions, the investigators specified that the woman was undergoing treatment for depression and that she herself used many drugs and consumed a lot of alcohol.
According to the agency AGI, the police went up to the nurse thanks to the statistics of the deaths which seemed abnormal for this hospital. By cross-checking, they succeeded in identifying this nurse as being the only person present in all the cases of suspicious deaths observed.
Finally, another disturbing element in this case, when she was transferred last October to another department where she was not in direct contact with patients, the mortality in her former intensive care unit fell from 20% to 12 %, said the investigators. She faces life imprisonment.
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