Dedicate a life to research and then be betrayed by it. It happened to Maurizio Federico, now Head of the National Center for Global Health of the ISS, and courageous father who lives with a pain dedicating himself to telling it so that it doesn’t happen to anyone again.
“Lisa was born in Ukraine. We adopted her when she was 5 and she was great until she was 17 years old. In June 2020 an autoimmune-based pathology arrives: she basically produced few platelets.
She was admitted to a hospital of excellence in Rome, the Bambin Gesù, where she was kept in the hospital for many, too many days, to make a diagnosis. It is a very long story with many details. She had been let out after sixty days, but in the second hospitalization the hospital decided to resort to a bone marrow transplant, to replace a marrow that was sluggish and in addition to platelets was not even starting to produce red blood cells.
This marrow came from Germany and was a qualitatively and quantitatively insufficient donation. Based on this, the doctors decided to infuse the entire donation, including the incompatible red blood cells, into the girl.
It was 350 ml of incompatible red blood cells. Normally 16 ml is enough to generate very important haemolysis (the process of destruction of red blood cells).
She has had 20 times as many, in a situation of total incompatibility. From 16 October a deterioration in her health began which led to her death on 3 November“.
Now the procedure is underway to see clearly: “After 5-6 months of violent shock we put together a few things, examined the medical records and we saw that there were all the reasons to ask the medical staff for clarity in judicial proceedings because too many things didn’t add up. After a very tiring search in looking for medical experts we decided to start this very painful path. At the moment there are 2 Bambin Gesù doctors under investigation, the Gup will have to decide whether to send them to trial. Furthermore, there is a parallel proceeding open on Franco Locatelli.
Our only hope is that this thing will be discussed in the trial, then how it goes will go.
Let’s say that the most sensational thing is this fact of infusing incompatible red blood cells into a person who was still rich in antibodies against the antigens of these ABO red blood cells.
It is something that is also studied in middle school, too trivial. The memory of 13 hours of suffering from Lisa is terrible“.