Newborn Baby Eaten Alive By Rats In Hospital, Doctors Have A Horrifying Response To Grieving Parents

A newborn baby was eaten to death by rats in a government hospital in India, and the doctor’s response to parents is almost as shocking as the infant’s death.

The incident happened this week in Hederabad, India. A baby, just a few days old, was taken to a hospital in Andhra Pradesh with problems breathing. Doctors put the baby in an incubator, but told the child’s parents that they were not allowed to stay with their baby.

“Early on Sunday morning my son started crying,” the baby’ mother, Lakshmi, told the Indian Telegraph. “As we are not allowed to stand next to the incubator, I urged the nurses to check on him. By the time they did, rats had eaten away the fingers of his right hand and also the eye.”

The newborn baby was rushed to the intensive care unit, but declared dead on Tuesday afternoon.

The tragic death was made worse by the callous response of hospital officials, said the baby’s father, Chavali Nagaraju Babu.

“This morning the hospital superintendent told me I need not worry as I have another son,” he said, sobbing.

Hospital chief Dr. Venugopala Rao said the hospital knew about the rats in the day before the infant was eaten to death.

“The presence of rodents had come to our notice on Monday morning and I asked the engineering wing to carry out repairs to the false ceiling, but unfortunately, the rodents attacked the newborn,” he told the Hindu newspaper.

The incident came just months after a group of 78 doctors spoke out about the rampant problems plaguing the country’s medical system.

The report detailed doctors forcing patients into unnecessary procedures in order to drum up more revenue for the hospital.

The Sydney Morning Herald reported as follows.

“In the report, doctors talk of how a reference for an angioplasty can earn a doctor a kickback; of how doctors order CT scans and MRIs that are not required; and of doctors referring patients to a clinic for electrocardiograms purely for the sake of getting the commission.

Given the gruesome state of most Indian government hospitals, where there are sometimes two patients to a bed, private hospitals have flourished.

Having made massive investments and faced with intense competition, many hospitals try to recoup their investment through such unethical means, including setting revenue ‘targets’ for doctors to meet.”

The health minister in Andhra, Kamineni Srinvias, has called for a full inquiry as to how rats could have killed the newborn baby inside a hospital.

[Picture by Christopher Furlong / Getty Images]