A hospital consultant who treated the former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, for exposure to the military nerve agent novichok did not initially think the two would survive, he has revealed.
Staff at Salisbury district hospital have described the extraordinary situation they faced when the Skripals were brought in for emergency care after being found unconscious on a bench in the town after their attempted assassination on 4 March.
Doctors said there was concern over the potential scale of the incident and if more casualties would be admitted as a result of contamination.
Dr Stephen Jukes, an intensive care consultant, told BBC2’s Newsnight in an interview to be broadcast on Tuesday: “When we first were aware this was a nerve agent, we were expecting them not to survive. We would try all our therapies. We would ensure the best clinical care. But all the evidence was there that they would not survive.”
On admission, the medical team suspected both were experiencing an opioid overdose, but that diagnosis quickly changed to a nerve agent poisoning.
Dr Duncan Murray, the head of intensive care, recalled his shock as he spoke to the nurse in charge, “and it was this conversation I really could never have imagined in my wildest imagination having with anyone”.
Once the nerve agent was diagnosed, it was simply a matter of keeping the Skripals alive. They were heavily sedated and given heavy doses of drugs designed to protect them from the effects of the poison to help restart their bodies’ natural production of a key enzyme.
But when PC Nick Bailey, one of the officers who had attended the scene, was admitted shortly afterwards with similar symptoms, hospital staff started to wonder if they too might fall victim to the nerve agent.
Lorna Wilkinson, the director of nursing at the hospital, said: “I suppose the key marker for me was when the PC [Bailey] was admitted with symptoms – there was real concern as to how big this could get.”
She said she thought: “Have we just gone from having two index patients [to] having something that actually could become all-consuming and involve many casualties? Because we really didn’t know at that point.”
The Skripals and Bailey have been discharged from hospital. When asked for their long-term prognosis, Dr Christine Blanshard, the medical director, said: “The honest answer is we don’t know”. The “total world experience” of treating novichok poisoning was that at the Salisbury hospital. “It’s safe to say we’re still learning,” she said.
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
