Second HIV transfused patient dies at K.H.M.H.
Just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse at the K.H.M.H., they did. Lucellie Peña, a thirty-two year old mother of five and one of the three patients who received HIV positive blood from the hospital, died on Sunday afternoon, not from AIDS, but from complications following treatment for gallstones. Peña had just been flown in on Wings of Hope from Merida on Saturday, where she had gone for corrective surgery following two prior operations by Dr. Jose Moguel, head of surgery at the K.H.M.H. Peña was originally admitted for a “Common Bile Duct Obstruction”. Reports are that when Dr. Moguel took out some gallstones on the fifteenth of March, he put in a tube to drain the bile duct. When he did the second surgery on March twenty-ninth, Peña had already started developing inflammation. That was when she needed a procedure known as an E.R.C.P. and Dr. Moguel recommended that she be flown out, as K.H.M.H. didn’t have the equipment necessary to perform the surgery. It was while waiting to secure the finances for the surgery that Peña developed an upper gastro-intestinal infection and bleeding, requiring a transfusion. That was when Lucellie Peña was given the HIV tainted blood, on March twenty-ninth. It is not clear what type of complications may have killed Peña although it is not believed that the HIV infected blood she received caused her death. Peña’s death brings to two the number of people who have died after receiving the HIV tainted blood so far. Two month old Andy Myers Jr. succumbed to his skin disease on April twelfth. The lone survivor is a six-year old Belize City girl who’s a sickle cell anaemia patient. The hospital’s chief executive officer Dr. Alvaro Rosado, told News 5 that neither he nor Dr. Jose Moguel could speak on camera today as the recently returned Dr. Moguel was busy writing up Peña’s death certificate. With two people dead, allegedly from causes other than potentially fatal transfusions, they will have a lot of explaining to do before anyone will voluntarily enter the K.H.M.H. without a fear of not coming out alive.
