The baby, Nicko Silar, was born with her umbilical cord wrapped around her neck and constricting her airway, causing severe brain damage, as the Wall Street Journal’s Kevin Poulsen, Robert McMillan and Melanie Evans report. She died nine months later.
Obstetricians would typically perform a Caesarean section delivery in such cases upon learning that the baby’s heart rate had slowed.
In this case, however, Springhill Medical Center in Mobile, Ala., was eight days into a ransomware attack that had crippled its computer systems. Nurses did not notice the fetal heart rate change, which was recorded on a strip of paper printed by the bedside monitor. It would normally have appeared on a large digital display at the nurses’ station where monitoring was far easier.
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