The par­ents of at least sev­en ba­bies who died be­tween April 2 and April 9 at the Neona­tal In­ten­sive Care Unit at the Port-of-Spain Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal are call­ing for a full in­ves­ti­ga­tion in­to the cir­cum­stances sur­round­ing their ba­bies’ deaths. The ba­bies, all un­der 32 weeks, died from sep­sis. Guardian Me­dia un­der­stands that at least one oth­er ba­by is in crit­i­cal con­di­tion.

The North West Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty, in a press re­lease is­sued on Thurs­day evening, con­firmed the deaths of the ba­bies say­ing it was as a re­sult of in­fec­tions. The au­thor­i­ty said lab­o­ra­to­ry tests de­tect­ed the pres­ence of three dan­ger­ous or­gan­isms—Ser­ra­tia marce­sens, ES­BL Kleb­siel­la pneu­mo­ni­ae, and Kleb­siel­la aero­genes.

“De­spite ad­min­is­ter­ing high-dose an­tibi­otics and pro­vid­ing ad­vanced and in­ten­sive car­dio-res­pi­ra­to­ry sup­port, the in­fec­tion claimed the lives of some of these preterm ba­bies, all weigh­ing un­der 1500 grammes and less than 32 weeks ges­ta­tion­al age.

“Through­out this chal­leng­ing or­deal, se­nior doc­tors were present pro­vid­ing care to the ba­bies. Par­ents were reg­u­lar­ly up­dat­ed of their con­di­tions. All par­ents have been re­ferred to our Med­ical So­cial Work De­part­ment for be­reave­ment coun­selling,” the NWRHA said in its re­lease.

Be­fore the NWRHA’s re­lease, three sets of par­ents, Guardian Me­dia spoke with, said that the true case of the deaths was not re­vealed to them. They had ques­tions about how the sit­u­a­tion was han­dled. The par­ents all said the deaths came as a ter­ri­ble sur­prise be­cause, be­fore the week­end, their chil­dren were all healthy.

One moth­er, who asked not to be named, wept un­con­trol­lably as she spoke, paus­ing nu­mer­ous times dur­ing the in­ter­view to try and com­pose her­self. She said she doesn’t know where to be­gin to come to terms with the loss of her daugh­ter.

She said she fought hard for her girl, spend­ing a month in the hos­pi­tal be­cause of hy­per­ten­sion is­sues, and then hav­ing an emer­gency C-Sec­tion, on­ly for this to hap­pen.

“She start­ed to see. She was mov­ing. She would have been four weeks on Sat­ur­day. Every­thing was well. I held her, I spoke with her. All the tests they took showed noth­ing.

“There were no signs of in­fec­tion at that point, un­til around Sat­ur­day I got a call from the hos­pi­tal say­ing that they moved her and put her in the back. I don’t know where. I don’t know why they moved her, but they had moved her from that area. Af­ter that, when I went in on Sat­ur­day to look for her, I re­alised all the ba­bies, who were with her, weren’t there. The hos­pi­tal staff was do­ing clean­ing, in­tense clean­ing. But they nev­er told us what it is—even up to now,” the moth­er said.

Ac­cord­ing to the moth­er, there were ten ba­bies in the NICU at the same time her daugh­ter was there. She said she heard three of them died in a sin­gle day. One moth­er lost twins—one to a sep­a­rate cause of death.

“What I heard was that there was a ba­by that came in with an in­fec­tion and af­ter that, there was a wide­spread in­fec­tion.

“They said they tried with her. She just de­clined sud­den­ly like in no time. She just sud­den­ly had all kinds of things go­ing wrong with her,” a moth­er said.

Guardian Me­dia al­so spoke with the fa­ther of a third ba­by girl who died. He be­lieved that the fam­i­lies were not be­ing told the truth.

“To tell you the truth, that’s a re­al mad scene. All those ba­bies died. It’s hard—re­al, re­al hard. My daugh­ter was healthy and every­thing when I saw her. I went back to see her and there were all these tubes in­side of her.

“I think they are cov­er­ing up. Some­thing is wrong. I’ll talk to my wife and de­cide the next step we will take be­cause right now every­body is just down,” he said.

Ac­cord­ing to the NWRHA, be­tween April 4 and 7, NICU staff ob­served a rapid de­te­ri­o­ra­tion in the clin­i­cal sta­tus of sev­er­al neonates. It said up­on recog­nis­ing the sever­i­ty of the sit­u­a­tion, the med­ical team im­me­di­ate­ly ini­ti­at­ed in­fec­tious dis­eases and con­trol pro­to­cols for the treat­ment of late-on­set neona­tal sep­sis.

“In re­sponse to this heart­break­ing sit­u­a­tion, the NICU was im­me­di­ate­ly closed to new ad­mis­sions to pre­vent fur­ther trans­mis­sion of the in­fec­tion and healthy ba­bies dis­charged. Rig­or­ous sani­ti­sa­tion and ster­il­i­sa­tion mea­sures were im­ple­ment­ed with ex­ter­nal con­trac­tors in­volv­ing clin­i­cal and non-clin­i­cal ar­eas,” the re­lease said. The NWRHA al­so ex­pressed con­do­lences to the af­fect­ed fam­i­lies.

The deaths of the ba­bies came as Trinidad and To­ba­go’s me­di­an neona­tal mor­tal­i­ty rate in 2022 (the lat­est avail­able da­ta), ac­cord­ing to UNICEF, was 9.75.

That was T&T’s low­est rate over the last 34 years. It was low­er than the world’s neona­tal mor­tal­i­ty rate of 17.27 but high­er than the Latin Amer­i­can and Caribbean rates of 9.03.