6-year-old dies after dental treatment and another in hospital

The Court of Instruction number 5 of Alzira (Valencia) and the Ministry of Health of the Generalitat are looking into what happened at a private dental clinic in the town last Thursday, November 20th, when a six-year-old girl died after getting treatment. A four-year-old boy who went to the same clinic hours earlier is now in the paediatric ICU of the Clinical Hospital of Valencia.

At 4:52 p.m. on Thursday, the six-year-old girl from Algemesí was taken to the Emergency Department of the Hospital de la Ribera in cardiac arrest. The paperwork collected when she was admitted said that her parents said she couldn’t breathe and had been feeling sick since going to the dentist that morning. The publication Levante-EMV further said that she showed signs of tiredness, breathing problems, and even vomiting at the clinic itself, where she was held under observation for a few hours before being sent home. She got better there, but her breathing issues went worse quickly. When they got to the hospital, they couldn’t save her even though they did a tracheotomy.

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At 3:11 p.m., another girl, who was four years old, had just arrived at the hospital. She had also been to the same dental facility before, where she developed a fever, vomited, and felt sleepy. She was moved to the paediatric ICU at the University Clinical Hospital of Valencia when her condition had stabilised. She is still in bad condition there. This made many worry that something was wrong at the Alzira clinic because two kids showed up with the identical symptoms on the same day.

The Health Department’s Inspection Service started looking into what happened on Friday to get to the bottom of it. As a preliminary step, they instructed the dental clinic, which had been open normally, to stop all activities as a precaution.

Mireia Vilar, the owner, couldn’t say what might have happened. “The girl seemed OK when she left here, but soon she started to feel sick. The dentist told the regional TV station Punt near her clinic, “We don’t know what could have happened.” She acknowledged that the dead kid had had “some baby teeth and fillings” removed early that morning and that she had been given medicine to help her sleep during the treatment, which she pointed to with her hand. “She was sedated, not given general anaesthesia.” The dentist emphasised, “It wasn’t an operation.”

“The anaesthesiologist doesn’t know what might have happened. “We don’t know what could have happened,” the owner said over and over. He was clearly upset and didn’t want to talk about what had happened. The case is now in the hands of the court and the National Institute of Toxicology, where samples from the minor’s autopsy have been sent to find out where the symptoms that led to her death may have come from.

The first thing to look into is the batch of drugs that were used to sedate the two girls. It may have been faulty, and the amount given to each girl over the course of a few hours that morning. They also want to know if there were any pathogens present that could have caused their symptoms and, in the case of the six-year-old girl, death by asphyxiation. The girl’s death has had a big effect on Alzira, where the dental facility is well-known.

Sources say that the dental facility in Alzira where the youngsters were treated does not have permission from the Valencian Ministry of Health to do anaesthesia operations, such as intravenous sedation. The clinic is a dental office that focusses on dentistry and stomatology, and it can give local anaesthetics without getting permission first.

On Saturday, agents from the Homicide Unit talked to the anaesthesiologist who sedated the two girls. Sources close to the probe said that the specialist was quite upset by the deaths and went into detail about the operations he did with his lawyer present.

He had met with technicians from the Health Services Inspection Service before. This is the group that makes sure that centres follow the rules for sedation and the use of anaesthetics. The goal is to find out if there was malpractice, an error in the dosage, or problems with keeping an eye on the substance that was given.