We had to kill our patients

That's the title of an article in the British The Mail I was pointed to by my friend Vittorio. It's incredible. So sad. I wonder if the news will be reported in the US and how people and the administration will react to it.

Apparently, doctors working in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans had to euthanize critically ill patients as they evacuated hospitals rather than leaving them to die in agony until rescue teams arrived:

With gangs of rapists and looters rampaging through wards in the flooded city, senior doctors took the harrowing decision to give massive overdoses of morphine to those they believed could not make it out alive.

In an extraordinary interview with The Mail on Sunday, one New Orleans doctor told how she 'prayed for God to have mercy on her soul' after she ignored every tenet of medical ethics and ended the lives of patients she had earlier fought to save.

I for one, can't blame the doctors who had to make these terrible decisions. Patients were divided into three categories, those who were traumatised but medically fit enough to survive, those who needed urgent care, and the dying:

"It came down to giving people the basic human right to die with dignity.

"Some of the very sick became distressed. We tried to make them as comfortable as possible.

[...]

Mr McQueen, a utility manager for the town of Abita Springs, half an hour north of New Orleans, told relatives that patients had been 'put down', saying: "They injected them, but nurses stayed with them until they died."

Mr McQueen has been working closely with emergency teams and added: "They had to make unbearable decisions."

The families of those who have died believe the doctors' confessions are an indictment of the appalling failure of the American authorities to help those in desperate need after Hurricane Katrina flooded the city, claiming thousands of lives and making 500,000 homeless.