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A NAME YOU CAN TRUST! Thursday, March 17, 2016
Vol 45, No 10
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‘Our baby is a fighter’
Eric Koh is on fire selling East Auckland. Eric Koh AREINZ M: 021 388 383
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TOUGH FIGHTER: Due to a pharmacy blunder, baby Sydney Tuffin, pictured here with mum Nina Brickland, could be left with lasting brain damage. Photo supplied
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eachlands infant Sydney Junior Tuffin, who was born with a hole in his heart, is a tough little fighter. Due to the pharmacy blunder, Sydney could be left with lasting brain damage which, according to the Herald on Sunday, won’t be picked up on for a few years. A pharmacy misread a prescription and gave him medication 10 times stronger than intended. Now that Sydney has the correct dosage, father Ben Tuffin told the Times his son is improving. Mr Tuffin and Nina Brickland welcomed their son on January 8 to discover he had a hole in his heart. According to the newspaper, a neonatal doctor at Middlemore prescribed 0.5ml a day of furosemide, a diuretic to keep the fluid off his lungs so he could grow strong enough for heart surgery. The new parents picked up Sydney’s prescription from an unnamed pharmacy not linked to the hospital and took their son home. They began administering the medicine once a day through
Sydney’s nasal tube and even had a home nurse visit daily, the newspaper wrote. Despite their efforts, Sydney kept losing weight. After taking him back to the hospital, tests showed Sydney had very low sodium levels and was dehydrated from an overdose of diuretics. Instead of the prescribed 0.5ml, Sydney had been given 5ml – 10 times the prescribed dose. “Because he was on such a high dose, every bit of food or water, it was just sucking all of it out of him,” Tuffin told the Herald on Sunday. The parents were told that because Sydney was severely dehydrated for a fortnight he could have suffered brain damage, but they won’t know for sure for a few years. “Sydney is doing really well, just his surgery to go,” he says. Although they have finally received an apology from the pharmacy, Tuffin admits it doesn’t sound genuine. “It wasn’t hand written and sounded more like her lawyer.” ■ Givealittle.co.nz/cause/help4sydneyandfamily.
1080 scare ‘financially motivated’ By NATALIE BRITTAN The man behind the 1080 infant milk formula contamination scare failed to convince the court his motive was not financial. Justice Geoffrey Venning last week ruled in the High Court at Auckland that Mellons Bay man Jeremy Kerr was under financial pressure when he wrote anonymous threat letters to Fonterra and Federated Farmers in 2014. He owed nearly half a million dollars to creditors.
Justice Venning by samples of infant ruled that the Crown formula contaminated had proved “beyond with 1080. reasonable doubt” that Kerr’s defence Kerr sought to gain lawyer John Billington financially. QC argued that money Despite his was not the “primary “altruistic” intent to driver” for his client’s change Government actions, disputing policy surrounding Crown allegations JEREMY KERR indiscriminate 1080 that Kerr’s motive was use, it was inconsistent “purely financial”. with the content of the letters, Questioned by the Crown, Justice Venning said. Kerr’s accountant Shane Hussey The letters were accompanied maintained that Kerr was in a
“relatively comfortable” even “enviable position” at the time of his offending. The 60-year-old businessman received about $100,000 in royalties a year from Feratox, a ground-deployed poison alternative to 1080. However, he spent more than $300,000 over the course of two years promoting his business, Nature’s Support, which manufactures possum fur products.
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