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posted by martyb on Wednesday March 28 2018, @11:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the cracked-some-eggs...-noggins-next? dept.

In a letter to nearly 1,000 patients, University Hospitals in Ohio says that a tank's remote alarm system, meant to alert an employee to temperature swings, was disabled for an unknown length of time. That led to the destruction of around 4,000 frozen eggs and embryos, double the original estimate:

Hospital officials say they doesn't know who turned the remote alarm off or how long it was disabled. They also said they were aware the tank in question needed preventative maintenance. Some of the eggs and embryos had been stored there since the 1980s. The hospital's investigation is ongoing.

"Right now we do not know whether it's mechanical or human or [a] combination," said James Liu, chairman of the department of obstetrics and gynecology at University Hospitals.

He says he doesn't think anyone intentionally disengaged the alarm. "Because it is a computer, we think it's unlikely that there was any kind of external force that was working to hack the computer or anything like that. We think it's unlikely," Liu said.

Previously:
Freezer Malfunction May Have Damaged Up to 2,000 Frozen Eggs and Embryos
Two Fertility Clinic Freezer Failures Occurred in a Single Day


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  • (Score: 2) by fadrian on Wednesday March 28 2018, @01:00PM (1 child)

    by fadrian (3194) on Wednesday March 28 2018, @01:00PM (#659464) Homepage

    Well, the lawyers deserve to be salivating in this one. There was monetary loss - people paid a lot for those embryos (in the orders of thousands of dollars), as anyone who has had IVF procedures can tell you. The clinic was clearly negligible about storing the embryos - they've as much as admitted it in their letter.

    I know some people have an irrational hatred of lawyers, but in this case, let them in to teach other medical facilities a lesson.

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    That is all.
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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Spelli on Thursday March 29 2018, @07:15AM

    by Spelli (6123) on Thursday March 29 2018, @07:15AM (#659872)

    Also, since they had eggs & embryos frozen in the 80s, some women might not be able to take the offer of free compensatory IVF cycles any more.
    Those women will now definitely never have children of their own.