Romania: Doctors Charged with Aggravated Murder for Killing Patients

Public outrage erupts in Romania over alleged homicides by doctors from Sf Pantelimon Hospital in Bucharest.

The Romanian public is reeling with shock and anger following the revelation that two doctors are accused of intentionally causing the death of a critically ill patient by manipulating their medication. The allegations against M.M.A. and P.M., as their names are hidden in prosecutors’ press release, have sparked widespread outrage in a country where medical professionals are held to the highest standard of care and are expected to save lives, not end them.

To cause the death of some patients who required intensive therapy but for whom the defendants considered that it was no longer appropriate to keep them alive, they devised and implemented a plan consisting of the sudden reduction of the dose of noradrenaline (an essential substance in intensive therapy, with a role in maintaining blood pressure), with the consequence of a drop in blood pressure, followed by cardiorespiratory arrest.

Prosecutors’ press release on charging doctors for aggravated murder

The doctors, M.M.A. and P.M., took advantage of the apparent vulnerability of the victim, a 54-year-old patient in a severe condition, hemodynamically unstable, with a blood pressure of 60/36 mm/Hg), acting to suppress the patient’s life, i -they reduced the dose of noradrenaline administered through the injector, from the value of 20 ml/h to the value of 1 ml/h, which led, 58 minutes later, to the installation of cardio-respiratory arrest, followed by the death of the patient declared at 15:00.

The crime is more repulsive as the two doctors tried to kill the same patient on March 26, but a nurse administered noradrenaline after the murder attempt.

On top of that, notably enough, this case was brought to public attention by a whistleblower who noticed that in that particular hospital, in the emergency room, there were 17 deaths over one weekend; this is why the prosecutors are still trying to investigate more deaths and charge the medical staff with any other similar crime they committed.

Sf. Pantelimon is not among the best hospitals in Bucharest, but these criminal acts of medical staff are beyond what anybody could have conceived.

This case reminded Romanian society about the thousands of deaths during the pandemic COVID19 when similar theories about doctors suppressing the lives of their patients on purpose were labelled as conspirational.