Three public medical institutions were found guilty of infecting a newborn baby with HIV. The court obliged these to pay 600,000 lei in respect of non-pecuniary damage. The Moldova Human Rights Institute (IDOM), whose lawyer represented the woman and her son in court, on its website said that even if serious violations were identified, the court didn’t order to collect all the requested damages and didn’t ascertain the disclosure of confidential information about the state of health. Therefore, the judgement passed by the primary court of law will be challenged in the Appeals Court, IPN reports.
The IDOM Litigation and Advocacy Program took over this case in July 2017. The applicant related that in 2016 she gave birth to a boy and in several days learned that she was infected with HIV. It was later established that the child was also infected, even if she was tested twice for HIV during pregnancy and the first testing result was negative.
To elucidate the circumstances of the infection of the child, a complaint about the acts of the medical personnel of different levels was submitted to the Ministry of Health, by which an inquiry was requested. The investigation commission established a series of violations and concluded that the pregnant woman wasn’t diagnosed with HIV on time and wasn’t administered ARV treatment earlier and during pregnancy. The newborn was breastfed and wasn’t administered ARV prophylactic treatment during the first 72 hours of life. As a result, the risk of infection for the newborn rose from 2% to 40-45%.
In September 2017, IDOM, representing the interests of the mother and child, sued three medical institutions. In the hearings, it was noted that the HIV is transmitted from the mother to the fetus transplacentarily (15%), during pregnancy and delivery (15%) and during breastfeeding (15%) so that the risk of the child becoming infected from the mother is of 13% to 50%, 30-45% on average in the absence of the ARV prophylactic treatment. The risk is reduced if the ARV treatment is administered to the mother during pregnancy and the child is not breastfed.
In June 2018, the ordinary court partially accepted the lawsuit and held that the child’s rights to health, physical and mental integrity and life were violated owing to medical negligence and that the woman’s rights to health and physical integrity were violated by the failure to detect the HIV virus in her on time. The court ordered that the three medical institutions pay damages totaling 600,000 lei in equal parts.
