Eliza Jane Scovill

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Eliza Jane Scovill

Eliza Jane Scovill (3 December 2001 – 16 May 2005) was the daughter of Christine Maggiore and Robin Scovill.

The cause of Eliza Jane's death after routine respiratory and ear infections has become the center of a controversy. The Los Angeles County Coroner concluded that Eliza Jane died of PCP due to AIDS (Los Angeles County Coroner 2005), while dissidents and other experts have contested this conclusion, stating that the evidence points to an anaphylactic allergic reaction to the antibiotic amoxicillin (Al-Bayati 2005).

UPDATE! → Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office announces it will not prosecute Maggiore

1 Eliza Jane's death
2 Coroner's report and medical debate
3 Media coverage
4 Quotes
5 Documents and external links
6 Footnote
7 References

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Eliza Jane's death

She suffered an upper respiratory infection on 30 April 2005, and on 14 May, she was prescribed and began taking the antibiotic amoxicillin, due to fluid in her eardrums. Eliza Jane stopped breathing just after midnight on the morning of 16 May and was taken to the emergency room of Valley Presbyterian Hospital. The hospital continued to administer amoxicillin. She was pronounced dead at 5:40 am. (Los Angeles County Coroner 2005)

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Coroner's report and medical debate

The official coroner's report, produced on 15 September by Dr. Chanikarn Changsri, the medical examiner at the Los Angeles County Coroner, and Dr. James Ribe, ^[1] concluded that Eliza Jane died of PCP due to AIDS (Los Angeles County Coroner 2005). This conclusion has been questioned, and Mohammed Al-Bayati has written a refuting report based on differential diagnosis, which concludes that Eliza Jane died of an allergic reaction to the amoxicillin (Al-Bayati 2005). Nicholas Bennett (MD) has responded to this report, affirming the original coroner's conclusion (Bennett 2005).

The ensuing debate over the cause of Eliza Jane's death has been a subject of many blogs and articles; see the external links below.

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Media coverage

The death of Eliza Jane and the surrounding controversy has attracted national media attention.

On 24 September, the Los Angeles Times ran an article, "A Mother's Denial, A Daughter's Death", which fully supported the PCP/AIDS conclusion and accused Christine Maggiore and Robin Scovill of recklessly contributing to their daughter's death by refusing AZT therapy while Christine was pregnant with Eliza Jane. The article sparked a heated controversy, as Maggiore and dissidents supporting her have attempted to respond to this article. Maggiore wrote a 150-word letter to the editor, which the L.A. Times has yet to publish.

On 8 December, ABC Primetime devoted a story to Eliza Jane's death.

Eliza Jane's story has received more balanced treatment from independent media. Fintan Dunne has interviewed both Al-Bayati and Maggiore on his online radio program, and Los Angeles CityBeat published an article by Celia Farber. See the external links below.

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Quotes

Christine Maggiore

"We just sent some footage to ABC Primetime, who is doing a segment that alleges to tell our side of the story, and in that, a week before she became ill, there's Eliza Jane at her friend's birthday party, blowing, over and over again, a party horn – the one with the long, curly thing that sticks out when you blow it and retracts when you breathe in – over and over and over again...this child that, a few weeks later, would be said to have died of fatal pneumonia." — Christine Maggiore (Dunne 2006a)
"I examined five H&E stained lung sections of Eliza Jane’s lungs microscopically and I see no evidence of inflammation and fibrosis. The alveolar spaces are free of exudates and the alveolar walls are free of inflammation and fibrosis. These sections (#05-3767: RML, RLL, RML, LLL, LUL) were obtained from the Los Angeles Medical Examiner’s Office and represent three samples from the right lung and two samples from the left lung. Furthermore, the Los Angeles County’s medical examiners (ME’s) also examined five similar H&E stained lung sections of Eliza Jane’s right and left lungs microscopically and found no evidence of inflammation or interstitial fibrosis. The ME’s finding and my observation clearly indicate that Eliza Jane did not suffer from pneumonia." — Mohammed Al-Bayati (Al-Bayati 2006)
"As I said in the report, if you add the weight of the fluid, the extra weight in these organs – the lung, the kidneys, the heart, and the liver – you get equal to 40% of the circulation. So, if somebody loses 40% of the circulation, they will collapse." — Mohammed Al-Bayati (Dunne 2006b)
"Did they do the evaluation in a scientific medical manner? The answer is no." — Mohammed Al-Bayati (Dunne 2006b)
"She had a heart attack – she wasn’t dying of an infection... They did a lymphocyte count on Eliza Jane when she was admitted to the hospital. Forget everything else. Her absolute lymphocyte count was 10,800 cells per milliliter... She could not have died from PCP and had 10,800 lymphocytes in her bloodstream at the time of death. No way. It just doesn’t happen... The World Health Organization has said that it is a legitimate standard way of gauging the immune system, in the absence of testing for CD4/CD8 ratios. An AIDS patient has to have below 1,000 total lymphocyte counts. Normal is about 4,000 to 8,000. EJ’s was 10,800. Even according to the most strident HIV dogmatists, AIDS is still a disease of too few lymphocytes, not too many. All the pathologists I talk to find this logic hard to refute. She could not have had PCP, nor died of it." — Andrew Maniotis, Department of Pathology, Anatomy and Cell Biology, and Bioengineering, College of Medicine, University of Illinois at Chicago (Farber 2006)
"She was a perfectly healthy child...until they gave her amoxicillin. Period. It's as simple as that. And those poor parents have not been given a chance to grieve yet, because their daughter's body was kept by the state for four months, while they were in torment, wondering what the hell was going to happen next." — Andrew Maniotis (Dunne 2006b)