A guideline is being prepared by US health care officials to decide whose ventilators will be disconnected in case of swine flu pandemic. It is based on what is called the New York protocol, which “calls for hospitals to withhold ventilators from patients with serious chronic conditions such as kidney failure, cancers that have spread and have a poor prognosis, or ‘severe, irreversible neurological’ conditions that are likely to be deadly.”
Dr. Carl Schultz at the University of California at Irvine says, “The problem with lowering the standard of care is where do you stop? How low do you go? If you don’t want to put any more resources in disaster response, you keep lowering the standard.”
Read the ProPublica story below for details.
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Alarm bells in this story include: