SOCIETY
FOURTH BABY DIES AFTER ROMANIA HOSPITAL FIRE
Baku, August 18 (AZERTAC).A fourth newborn baby has died after a fire in the intensive care unit of a maternity hospital in Romania, a hospital official said Tuesday.
The baby died at the Grigore Alexandrescu Hospital, where another seven were being treated, said Dr. Radu Balanescu, the hospital`s medical director. One of those babies was in poor condition Tuesday and the other six were stable, he said.
Autopsy results on three babies whose deaths were announced earlier show that one died from smoke inhalation and the other two died from lack of oxygen, said Marcus Iacob, the prosecutor in charge of the investigation.
All the babies have been identified, Balanescu said, but officials still planned to run DNA tests to confirm their identities.
The fire at Giulesti Maternity Hospital in the capital, Bucharest, began Monday after an electrical cable in the air conditioning system caught fire behind a wooden closet in the intensive care unit, according to prosecutors` preliminary conclusions. The cable had not been installed and isolated properly, they said.
Pictures of the burned intensive care unit, published Tuesday in the Romanian newspaper Adevarul, showed a burned incubator, a blackened room, and equipment that had melted and was singed.
Prosecutors said the fire burned slowly for about an hour before any medical staff entered the room. The intensive care room had been unstaffed at the time, they said.