|
?:reviewBody
|
-
In April 2019, the Zambian Observer reported that a nurse/midwife suffering from terminal cancer had purportedly made a shocking end-of-life confession. During her 1983-95 tenure in the maternity ward at University Teaching Hospital (UTH) in the Zambian capital city of Lusaka, the nurse supposedly confessed, she swapped close to 5000 babies and gave them to the wrong parents (i.e., persons other than the children's biological parents) for fun: Many readers wrote the article off as an obvious joke, expressing extreme skepticism about the premise of the story and its notion that so many babies could have been switched at birth over an extended period of time (a rate of about one infant a day, every day, for thirteen years) without many parents having raised an issue with hospital administrators -- especially if, as claimed, the results of the midwife's fun pranking had caused multiple couples to divorce after going for DNA tests. Nonetheless, according to the Lusaka Times, local officials took the report seriously enough that an investigation was conducted by the General Nursing Council of Zambia, who turned up no nurse matching the name of the one cited in the Zambian Observer article: The Zambian Observer then unironically reported on that debunking of their own article. Aside from the rather incredible nature of the claim, and the fact that the Zambian Observer is a generally unreliable source, we note that that five days later the website used the very same purported photograph of nurse Elizabeth Bwalya Mwewa to accompany an article about a mistaken swap of a single pair of newborn babies at a different hospital in Zambia (Ndola Teaching Hospital) -- yet that picture had previously appeared in the blog of Ma Sedaye, who is described as a Zimbabwean woman now living in Columbus, Ohio:
(en)
|
![[This page as RDF]](http://data.gesis.org/claimskg/static/rdf-icon.gif){kind=icon}