The doctors who treated Russian former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter after they were poisoned with a nerve agent in Britain say they do not know the pair’s long-term health outlook — and initially feared that the incident could have been much worse.
Skripal, a former colonel in Russia’s military intelligence who betrayed dozens of agents to Britain, and daughter Yulia were found unconscious on a public bench in the southern English city of Salisbury on March 4.
PROXIMITY FEAR
Staff at Salisbury District Hospital, where they were treated, told the BBC that some started to wonder whether they too would fall victim to the nerve agent.
Asked about the long-term effects of the poisoning on the Skripals’ health, hospital medical director Christine Blanshard said the prognosis was uncertain.
“The honest answer is we don’t know,” she said, according to extracts of an interview released by the BBC’s Newsnight.
Britain has said that it is highly likely that Russia was responsible for the poisoning of the Skripals, and Western governments, including the US, have expelled more than 100 Russian diplomats. Russia has denied any involvement in the poisoning and retaliated in kind.
EXPECTING THE WORST
Hospital staff said they expected that the Skripals would die as a result of the poisoning.
“All the evidence was there that they would not survive,” said Stephen Jukes, an intensive care consultant who treated the Skripals a week after they arrived at the hospital.
The medical team initially suspected that the Skripals were experiencing an opioid overdose before the diagnosis quickly changed, he added.
Salisbury was transformed by the incident, with major shopping areas cordoned off while decontamination of the locations the Skripals visited took place.
A police officer was admitted to hospital with symptoms after attending to the Skripals and hospital staff feared that the incident might have been far more serious than first thought.
“When the [officer] was admitted with symptoms — there was a real concern as to how big could this get,” hospital director of nursing Lorna Wilkinson said, adding that she feared it could have “become all-consuming and involve many casualties. We really didn’t know at that point.”
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