UAE | Health
Pregnant Emirati may lose baby due to Swine Flu
Pregnant Emirati placed under quarantine in ICU suffering from pneumonia due to flu
- By Mohammed N. Al Khan, Staff Reporter
- Published: 23:01 July 27, 2009
Dubai: A pregnant 25-year-old Emirati woman has been diagnosed with H1N1 swine flu virus and is currently in a medicated coma at Welcare Hospital.
The woman, who is five-and-a-half-months pregnant, is also suffering from pneumonia as a result of the flu and has a history of severe asthma.
"Doctors at Welcare have told us that it's a 50:50 chance that she might lose the baby; they say that it is in critical but stable condition," her brother Mohammad told Gulf News.
"She has been placed under quarantine in the Intensive Care Unit, we can't go in to see her; we are all just looking at her through video monitors," he says.
"She has been like this for a week now and doctors say it may take another two or more weeks before she begins to recover."
The woman works at a bank. Her family is not sure how she contracted the virus since she hasn't been travelling. "Our only assumption is that the day before she got sick she went to visit a friend who had flu symptoms. We have checked with the friend and she seems to be fine now. So we don't know exactly how she got it," said Mohammad.
The family is blaming Dubai Hospital for the severity of her condition. "How could they let a swine flu case slip through like that? Government hospitals are the ones concentrating on swine flu and they just ignored my sister's condition," says Mohammad.
"I took my sister to Dubai Hospital Emergency Room on Monday [July 13]. She was complaining that she was feeling weak, nauseous and had a fever. We were worried about the baby as this is her first pregnancy," says Mohammad.
"We were made to wait for almost an hour until her husband yelled at them and made a scene. A doctor examined her and gave her an injection. No other medication was given, and she was discharged."
"The next day she was feeling even worse and had a fever of about 41 degrees Celsius. We took her back to Dubai Hospital Emergency Room, where they made her sit in a wheelchair for almost an hour with no doctor or nurse giving her any attention, even when she was vomiting."
"We decided to leave the hospital as she wasn't getting any care there; nobody even stopped us or asked us where we were going. We took her to nearby Al Baraha Hospital. They were very fast and got her on a [intravenous] drip right away and had a doctor look in on her every 10 minutes. They told us that they wanted to admit her for 72-hour observation, but her husband said if she needed to be admitted then he would have her admitted to Welcare Hospital. They made us sign a waiver that we were discharging her against doctor's orders."
Case history: Hospital's explanation
A spokesperson for Dubai Hospital said: "The hospital staff is well equipped to deal with Swine flu cases and we follow WHO guidelines and protocol. In this specific case, the patient visited Dubai hospital ER section on July 13, at 6.40pm. She was seen by a nurse at 7.10pm and by the doctor at 7.35pm. Her condition was stable and her main complaint was nausea and vomiting, which are common symptoms in pregnancy. She had no previous history of travel. She refused to undergo tests such as the blood count test. She was given a prescription but left without taking it with her. The next day her symptoms would have become more prominent, however she did not wait to see the doctor.''
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