Patient Exposes 'gagging of Babies' in Russian Hospital

Russian prosecutors are investigating claims that staff at a hospital gagged babies with tape because they were fed up with hearing them cry.

A patient at the hospital in Yekaterinburg, Russia's fifth-largest city, reported the case after allegedly hearing the children's muffled cries. She used her mobile phone to film a baby lying in a cot with his mouth taped, while others had dummies taped to their mouths. The children at the city's hospital number 15 were all orphans.

Prosecutors said they had opened a criminal investigation and had discovered sticking plasters had been used on babies at the hospital. "Children in the first year of life were systematically gagged with sticking plaster to make children behave quietly," the prosecutor's office said.

The case has provoked outrage in Russia and drawn attention to the country's chronically overstretched and under-funded health system. Nurses are badly paid and are often responsible for large numbers of patients. The patient who reported the scandal, Elena Kuritsyna, had been in the hospital with her own children. "I heard that a baby was mumbling in a neighbouring room. When I looked in I saw the baby with a plaster over his mouth. He could not cry or do anything," she told Reuters television.

Mrs Kuritsyna said she complained to staff but was told to mind her own business. She eventually persuaded the nurse to remove the plaster, she said, but afterwards the nurse replaced it.

"There is no point in scapegoating the nurse. It doesn't solve the problem," Vladimir Popov, the head of Yekatarinburg's human rights defence league said today. "The problem is not the bad treatment of orphans but the terrible salaries paid to our nurses."

The nurse involved has been suspended and the head of the hospital reprimanded. Today, however, hospital officials said the tape did not cover babies' mouths completely and was used only to stop the dummy from falling on the floor.

The middle-aged nurse responsible had to look after 25 orphans on her own, they added. "We heard the complaints from the mother and talked to the nurse. The nurse said she did what she had always been doing. The shots on TV were taken from a neighbouring room, and from a wrong angle," one hospital official said.

She added: "We were shocked. But it's normal practice to fix a dummy with a plaster when there is no mother to look after a child. It's not used to silence babies."