My research was misused to convict Lucy Letby — so I did my own inquiry (The Times)

Excerpt:

According to Lee there are two “specific” signs of air embolism — the Lee sign (a specific skin discoloration characterised by pink-red blood vessels visible against a purplish-blue background, named after the neonatologist) and the Liebermeister sign (when the pale areas are seen on the tongue). Both were absent.

He added that infants in the trial should never have been diagnosed with air embolism as it was “a very rare and specific condition and should not be diagnosed by excluding other causes of death or collapse and concluding that it must be a case of air embolus because nothing else could be found”.

However, the appeal court judges said his evidence was inadmissible because he was not called to the trial by Letby’s defence. They said: “No good reason has been shown why the applicant should now be allowed to adduce evidence which could have been obtained and adduced at the appropriate time.”

Lee said last week: “So what they were saying during the trial was that the baby collapsed and he had this skin discolouration which equals air embolism. And what I said during the appeal was, ‘No it doesn’t’.”

Although he said that in cases of air embolism there are instances of skin discolouration, this can also be caused by hypoxia when the body, or a region of the body, is deprived of adequate oxygen at tissue level. Hypoxia can be caused by a number of factors, including heart and respiratory problems and infections.

“Any kind of hypoxia can cause these discolorations and the reason is that when you are hypoxic, the blood vessels in the body try to protect your organs, so it shunts all the blood to your brain, to the heart, so it reduces the blood supply going to the skin because the skin is less important,” he said. As a result, he said, “the local blood vessels in the skin try to react by redistributing the blood in the skin”.

Lee also said that skin discolouration was only a factor in around 10 per cent of air embolism cases, where as in the case of Letby’s victims it was present in nine of the 17 babies.

He said: “If 10 per cent of air embolism show skin discolorations, then if there are nine babies with skin discolorations, then there must be 81 other cases of air embolism deaths with no skin discolorations. And in this case, there were nine babies that they claimed had air embolism because they had collapsed and [had] skin discoloration. So there should be a total of 90 deaths in this hospital from air embolism, nine with skin discolorations and 81 without to prove this theory.

“So unless you can tell me that there were 90 babies in the hospital that died from air embolism, of which nine showed this, that doesn’t make any sense.”

Lee also said that instances of air embolism were “very rare”. When he wrote the paper there had only been 57 and even now there have only been 117 cases in babies anywhere in the world.