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6-year-old dies after taking wrongly-filled prescription

When a person goes to a pharmacy in Baltimore to have a prescription filled, he or she probably doesn’t think twice about it being correct before taking it. It is probably safe to say that most people likely don’t even look at the bottle of a prescription that they take regularly.

The mother of a 6-year-old who died after taking a prescription that was filled incorrectly will likely always check to make sure her prescriptions are correct before taking them. Her 6-year-old daughter suffered from sickle cell anemia, a disease that can cause severe bouts of pain. The little girl was prescribed morphine in order to help ease her pain when the pain would get too intense.

Although the mother was a longtime customer at the pharmacy where the prescription was filled, they evidently made a fatal error on her daughter’s morphine prescription. Instead of filling it at the prescribed amount of 20 milligrams per 10 milliliters, the pharmacy made the dose 10 times stronger by filling it at 20 milligrams per 1 milliliter.

The dose was so high that the little girl died of morphine toxicity the day after she took a dose. Her mother has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the pharmacy. Although her lawyer had high hopes of being able to settle the case outside the courtroom, the pharmacy’s insurance company made that impossible when they tried to say that it wasn’t the pharmacy’s error that killed the girl, but the sickle cell anemia.

Hopefully the lawsuit will enable the mother to receive proper compensation for her daughter’s death and help her pay for her funeral costs and any outstanding medical bills that she has.

Source: Yahoo News, “Mom Sues Pharmacy After Daughter’s Fatal Overdose,” Katie Moisse, Aug. 21, 2013

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