Lebanon’s state prosecutor announced over the weekend that a doctor detained last week has confessed to misdiagnosing a baby which may have resulted to a condition that required the amputation of her four limbs.
State Prosecutor Samir Hammoud told LBC Saturday that Dr. Issam Maalouf confessed during a police interrogation to misdiagnosing Ella Tannous, who is less than one year old.
For that reason, the physician was arrested and referred to Beirut’s Investigative Judge George Rizk last week, Hammoud said.
Maalouf's arrest during interrogation Wednesday prompted the Order of Physicians to issue a work stoppage order to its 12,000 members in protest.
Antoine Boustani, the head of the Order, said Friday that the doctors would continue to strike until Maalouf was released.
When contacted Sunday by The Daily Star, Maalouf said he was no longer dealing with the media and refused to say if he had called off the work stoppage in light of Maalouf's alleged confession.
Speaking to LBC's Kalam al-Nass talk show in a report aired last week, Ella’s father, Hasan, said his daughter had a temperature of 40 degrees Celsius for a period of five days in February, almost a week after her older sister suffered from a bacterial infection.
He contacted the doctor who prescribed medication to lower the child’s temperature, but did not link the condition to the sister’s bacterial infection.
Ella’s mother, Eliana, told the program they decided to take the baby to Our Lady of Succour Hospital in Jbeil one morning after they discovered that she could not move.
After she was admitted, new symptoms emerged. Ella’s limbs grew purple and she displayed skin aberrations on parts of her body. Maalouf, however, was not alarmed, assuring that the symptoms were normal and did not require intensive treatment, the mother said. Hassan said Maalouf told him his daughter had suffered kidney failure.
But Ella’s case continued to deteriorate and her parents opted to take her to the American University Hospital in Beirut where her limbs were later amputated.
