SEATTLE — A King County jury heard opening statements in a trial to determine if Seattle Children’s hospital bears responsibility for a mold infection that led to complications for a 2-year-old patient.
It’s the first case to go to trial from a rash of Aspergillus mold infections forced the hospital to shut down and scrub its operating rooms in 2019, twice.
The lawsuit was filed by the family of a boy identified in court papers as H.K. He was 2 years old when he suffered a brain aneurysm that was treated at Seattle Children’s.
The family lawyer told the jury that doctors removed a section of H.K.’s skull in operating room 9 to access the child’s injured brain.
“The operating room is supposed to be a sterile environment. It was not,” attorney Karen Koehler said to jurors.
She said the skull bone was exposed to aspergillus mold in the operating room, which was detected days later. Since the doctors had a positive mold test, they opted not to put the bone flap back in H.K.’s skull.
The lawsuit says the plastic replacement part that doctors used instead led to complications for H.K.
The hospital denies the allegations in the lawsuit, including that the medical team acted below the standard of care treating the aneurysm.
“This is not a case about Aspergillus infection. And that’s because [the child] … did not have an aspergillus infection,” said Jake Winfrey, lawyer for Seattle Children's.
It’s true that H.K. did not acquire aspergillosis at the hospital, but H.K.’s lawsuit says he suffered complications as a result of a plastic plate that doctors used to replace the infected skull bone.
The trial is expected to last five to six weeks. The plaintiff’s are asking for damages ranging from $40 million to $53 million.
Long-running problem
In 2019, KING 5 first requested public health records from Seattle Children's following a public address from the hospital admitting a long-running problem with Aspergillus mold infections linked to its operating rooms.
Since 2001, more than a dozen young patients have been infected by Aspergillus mold. Seven have died.
The hospital's legal team attempted to block the release of the mold-related records by Public Health – Seattle & King County and the Washington State Department of Health (DOH).
A Washington state appeals court upheld a lower court order requiring public health departments to release to KING 5 documents related to Aspergillus mold infections at Seattle Children’s hospital.
Lawyers representing 19 current and former patients at Seattle Children’s Hospital said they have interviewed more than 100 people “with similar experiences,” who may have been infected by Aspergillus mold during visits to the hospital.
The plaintiffs claim that there are far more victims of hospital-acquired mold infections, stretching back over more years than the hospital has acknowledged.
A lawyer for Seattle Children’s, Stephen Rummage, argued in 2021 that Aspergillus is a common mold and it's often impossible to tell where the infection was acquired.
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