NEW DELHI – At least fourteen newborns have died following a fire that broke out Wednesday in the maternity ward of the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (Pims) in Islamabad. According to a local TV channel, at the time of the fire the ward housed 16 babies, according to other sources only 15. Some of them were inside incubators, others were connected to oxygen tanks that exploded upon contact with the flames. Rescue teams responded to an emergency call made shortly before 7 a.m. local time, when it was 4 a.m. in Italy.
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According to initial reconstructions, the fire broke out due to the explosion of an air conditioner compressor. Rescuers say they saved 19 people: ten women, seven children, and two men. According to the father of one of the victims, the ward did not have fire safety systems and at the time of the outbreak all access doors were locked except one. Relatives of some newborns who died in the fire have reported delays in the rescue efforts.
A frequent phenomenon
In Pakistan, fires in large buildings are frequent, often due to inadequate safety regulations and building codes, as well as poor enforcement of the rules. In January, over 65 people died in a fire at a shopping center in the port city of Karachi, where in 2012 a tragedy claimed the lives of at least 250 workers in a textile workshop inside a building without fire escape stairs.
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The Islamabad fire is one of the most serious ever to break out in a hospital in Pakistan, a country of nearly 260 million inhabitants where public healthcare suffers from inadequate facilities and lack of sufficient funds to meet the needs of the large part of the population that cannot afford private facilities.
Fires in hospitals are frequent throughout South Asia: in India, in the state of Maharashtra, a few days ago three newborns died due to a respirator malfunction, while last March a fire killed ten patients in an intensive care unit of a hospital in Odisha.
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