According to the investigation, non-sterile instruments and supplies may have been the cause of the infection. The Blagoveshchensk court closed the criminal case of negligence against the doctors of the Amur regional clinical children’s hospital due to the expiration of the statute of limitations. According to the investigation, for nine years – from 2009 to 2018 – staff used unsterile instruments and did not properly process catheters used in blood transfusions. Investigators believe this resulted in 169 children contracting hepatitis C. The charges of negligence were brought against Ase Serga, the deputy chief physician for medical care, Galina Platonova, the head of the epidemiology department, and Irina Baturskaya, the head of the hematology department. The doctors denied guilt. The criminal case reached the court only at the end of October 2020, and the statute of limitations expired on December 31: for the offense of negligence, it is 2 years from the moment of committing the crime. “The department had an enormous amount of work to do in 2 months – to interview all the victims, of which there were 169 people, to study all 149 volumes of the criminal case, each containing up to 300 pages. Several court hearings were held during this time. But the court cannot violate the law and exceed the established statute of limitations,” Alexander Voronin, the press secretary of the Blagoveshchensk City Court, said in an interview with Amur Life.
The information about mass cases of hepatitis C among cancer patients treated at the regional children’s hospital first appeared in December 2018. As reported by the Russian service of the BBC, parents of infected children have been trying for years to get the actions of medical professionals investigated, approaching the authorities of the region and even contacting Vladimir Putin. Finally, in 2019, Amur authorities acknowledged that there is a focus of the disease in the hospital, which has already affected dozens of patients. Rospotrebnadzor conducted an epidemiological investigation for more than six months, as a result of which a link was established between the infection of children and the provision of medical care to them at the AODKB. The department found that a total of 169 children were infected, with the earliest episode dating back to 2000. About 20 families have already won lawsuits for compensation of moral damages related to the infection of children with hepatitis C during treatment in a hospital. On average, children were awarded 400-500 thousand rubles.