KURNOOL: Seven more infants died at the Government General Hospital in Kurnool on Thursday, just a day after four babies lost their lives.Though the hospital authorities refused to admit lapses on their part, bereaved families alleged that their kids had died due to a defective oxygen supply system.The same has been corroborated by sources in the hospital.According to them, a pipeline that supplies oxygen to the neonatal ward has not been working properly because of negligence of the administration.As a result, the supply of oxygen has been interrupted.The paediatric ward is itself in a deplorable state.Leave alone oxygen, even power supply is far from satisfactory.Of the 11 babies that died, four were male.All the little ones were aged between two and four years.Their parents are from Nandikotukur, Atmakur, Pamulapadu, Remata, Kurukunda, Kodumuru (all Kurnool) and Chennupadu (Mahaboobnagar).Doctors, though, maintained that there was no defect in the supply of oxygen and claimed that the infants had died due to post-natal complications.“All the infants had a weight of one kg or less (a healthy infant weighs about two kg or more).Such low-weight infants usually have very little chances of survival.We have done our best to save them but we could not do anything because all of them were born before the regular pregnancy period of nine months,” a doctor explained.When the infants died one after the other between 5 p.m.and 7 p.m., their parents picked up an argument with the hospital staff blaming them for the tragedy.District Collector Ramshankar Naik constituted a committee to probe the deaths.
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