Three years have passed since the tragic end of Loredana Guida, a journalist and teacher from Agrigento who died of malaria at the age of 44 in January 2020. Three years without a culprit. Three years of pain and waiting for the mother and brothers who continue to ask for justice. And now they are addressing the President of the Republic, the Minister of Health and the judiciary with a heartfelt letter-complaint in which they recount the terrible odyssey of a curious, intelligent, generous woman full of will to live. A letter that is an appeal not to fall silent on a case of medical malpractice for which no one has yet paid.
Loredana is a primary school teacher, loves children and has a dream: to open a school in Nigeria, a country where she was on vacation and fell in love with. For this reason, in January 2020 she returns to Africa to seek help to carry out her project. She is enthusiastic about the trip, but a few days after returning to Italy she begins to feel bad: high fever, exhaustion. She calls the family doctor and tells him she has just been to Nigeria. “It’s the flu. It will pass”, replies the doctor who doesn’t even go to visit her. But she doesn’t pass. On the contrary. The teacher’s condition worsens. On January 15, worried, she went to the emergency room of the San Giovanni di Dio hospital in Agrigento. She stands for 9 hours with a fever of 39 waiting for someone to help her. She repeats that she has been in Nigeria, nobody gives her an account, nobody does the most banal of tests: that of malaria.
An exam that in just 7 minutes he could have ascertained the cause of the serious malaise that has been nailing her to bed for days. Realizing that no one would give her an answer, she was exhausted and signed her resignation and went home: outside her, her mother was waiting for her, forced to wait in the car because there wasn’t even one in the triage room. chair to sit on. With her days, Loredana gets worse and writes again to her doctor, who still doesn’t visit her and, on her phone, prescribes medicines. Her medicines will end up aggravating the disease that no one has diagnosed yet: malaria of the most serious strain, falciparum, very aggressive but curable if discovered in time. 4 more days go by. On January 19, Loredana goes to the Guardia Medica.
The conditions are now very serious: the pressure is almost absent, but the doctors just give her drops and send her home. For hospitalization she will have to wait another 24 hours, when she arrives at the hospital in a coma. The terrified family members ask the doctors to contact the infectious diseases department of the Civico di Palermo. There is still no talk of the malaria test. Only on January 21 will the exam finally be performed and the answer will arrive. But – the tragic story is not over yet – the hospital pharmacy is closed and to get the life-saving drug, quinine, you have to go to Catania. A car leaves from Agrigento for the Etna capital: an interminable journey because, the woman’s own family will tell, the general manager of the ASP instead of worrying about hurrying, optimizes the use of the machine by first completing some business for the company. The quinine finally arrives.
Too late, however: at 3.35 on 28 January, after a two-week ordeal, Loredana dies. «The experts – tell the brothers Giuseppe and Luisa – have no doubts: if the disease had been discovered on January 15, he would have had an 80% chance of surviving and even when he was already in a coma, if action had been taken, the chance of survival would have been 60%». Instead Loredana continues for days, unheard, to repeat to the doctors about her trip to Africa and no one listens to her. After the family’s complaint, the Public Prosecutor’s Office is asking for the indictment for manslaughter of the general practitioner Francesco Sciortino, the medical guard, Gioacchino Brucculeri, and the emergency room doctor, Maurilio Castelli. Filing is requested for two nurses. Ditto for the chief of intensive care, Antonio Marotta, and for Alida Lauria, another doctor on duty in the emergency room.
Despite the misgivings of the magistrate, which requires further investigations into the two doctors, the prosecutors once again ask for the case to be closed, claiming that “Loredana’s health conditions were now critical and that nothing could have been done to save her life”. For justice, therefore, it is an inevitable fatality. But the family does not believe in fatality. And he calls for a fair trial “where the parties, each questioned for their own responsibilities in the adversarial procedure that befits a civilized country, can and must express their reasons by declaring themselves innocent until proven guilty”. But, if guilty, they are to be condemned without resorting to shortcuts.