April 10 (UPI) — Russian authorities are prosecuting doctors who mistakenly injected a patient with an embalming chemical last weekend, killing her.
While hospitalized, the woman was accidentally injected with formaldehyde instead of saline, officials said.
Ekaterine Fedyaeva was admitted to a hospital in Ulyanovsk, 435 miles east of Moscow, for routine surgery. Doctors mistakenly gave her an intravenous formalin drip instead of a regular saline drip.
Formalin is an element of formaldehyde, used often for embalming purposes, infused into the veins of the dead to prevent decomposition.
“We had no idea it was formalin, and they knew very well that they washed up her body with a poison, and they did nothing to help,” mother Galina Baryshnikova said of the hospital staff. “Now I understand that formalin was simply eroding her body from inside.”
Baryshnikova blamed the doctors at the hospital, adding, “I think they wanted me to go away and hide everything.”
Fedyaeva, 28, was admitted for stomach pains, convulsions and vomiting for two days before she fell into a coma. She died after she was flown to a Moscow hospital.
A criminal investigation is underway.
