THE health authority has confirmed that a mentally ill patient, who has the deadly HIV/AIDS, sneaked into the nursery of the Victoria Jubilee Hospital and breastfed a week-old baby over the weekend.
"I must admit that the situation has occurred," Lyttleton 'Tanny' Shirley, chairman of the board of the South East Region Health Authority, told the Observer.
Shirley and a source at the hospital said that the incident occurred on Saturday night shortly before the mentally ill woman was due to give birth to her own child.
Health authorities were up to late yesterday trying to locate the child's mother to inform her of the incident.
As a precautionary measure, doctors were treating the affected child with antiretroviral drugs, according to the Observer source, who said that the child is expected to be tested for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, in another six weeks.
Breast-feeding is a mode by which HIV can be passed on, and the hospital source was yesterday worried that the child may be at a greater risk of contracting HIV due to an already weakened immune system from a previous infection.
It was not clear for how long the woman was breastfeeding the child before being caught by a worker on the ward. "The mad woman a breastfeed the baby," the worker shouted, bringing attention to the situation, the source said.
The incident has raised concerns about security at the hospital.
According to the source, there was no security officer on the ward at the time of the incident because of an effort to cut back on expenses. Security personnel are usually present during the day on each floor of the multi-storey building, said the source, who expressed concerns that the situation could have been far more tragic.
But according to Shirley, the incident did not constitute a security breach. He also denied any cost cutting where security is concerned and said that the woman was able to enter the nursery as she was a patient at the hospital.
"Security was intact and security was in place," said Shirley, who spoke to the Observer shortly after leaving a meeting to discuss the situation. "Remember [the woman] is not an outsider, she is a patient co-existing with other patients on the ward in which the incident took place."
The offending woman has since been removed from the hospital, the Observer was told.
Read more: http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/HIV-patient-breastfeeds-another-woman-s-baby-at-Jubilee_9624947#ixzz1XBjyUpwD
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