A month ago, the blogosphere described a news report of active euthanasia in Katrina-flooded New Orleans. See, e.g., here, here, and this blog here. According to the AJOB Editors Blog, the story may be false:
After investigating the story that patients were euthanized in the New Orleans nursing home, we discovered (as did several reporters) that the original source for the original story in a New Zealand newspaper was not a physician or healthcare worker at all but in fact a bystander whose story could not be corroborated and in fact who could not be found to give more detail. I'm guessing it was a hoax, in fact.
Now I am the first to say that the story is still interesting in that it raises some of the issues that we confront in the special Bioethics in the Eye of the Storm issue, particularly concerning whether or not in fact it might have been appropriate under certain circumstances to aid patients in dying peacefully (the literal meaning of euthanasia) who would otherwise have imminently died in great pain. The "battlefield triage" question, in other words.
But that is not the question that CNN is asking. They are chasing phantoms in New Orleans, and from the read of it there is still no real evidence to support going on what may well take on a new life as a conspiracy theory. . . .
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