LONDON LETTER/Frank Millar: Little James Fernandez was born 17 weeks premature, weighing in at just 1lb 1oz. He died in his parents' arms an hour after his birth at Queen Mary's Hospital in Kent last November. His parents, Patrick Kelly and Amaia Fernandez, mourned their tragic loss.
But there was yet more heartache to come. Four days before the funeral the undertakers discovered the baby's body had gone missing from the hospital mortuary.
The corpse was subsequently found at an industrial laundry 13 miles away, on a conveyor belt among blankets and medical garments, having been put through a 95 degree (F) wash.
Unimaginable? Unthinkable? In Britain, in the year 2001? Alas not.
Last Friday Mr Tony Blair fairly insisted the debate about the health service could not and should not turn on any one case, no matter how hotly contested. Condemning what he characterised as a Tory campaign of "denigration" designed to persuade voters that Britain's public services weren't worth saving, the Prime Minister told his Newcastle audience.
"Each individual case of actual or perceived service failure, accepted or disputed, true or false, is luridly headlined in order to demoralise us all."
Critics found it a bit rich to have Mr Blair condemning Mr Iain Duncan Smith for using tactics of a kind so successfully deployed by New Labour against the last Conservative government. Nor is it yet clear the Tory leader made a huge tactical mistake in highlighting the alleged neglect of Mrs Rose Addis at London's Whittington Hospital, no matter how frequently ministers repeat that particular line.
It is true that recent excitable press comment about a Conservative revival is far ahead of the game. And it has until now been a truism of British politics that the Tories can never "win" on the health question, their best hope always to neutralise the NHS as an election issue.
Nearly five years into a Labour government, however, there is no longer the same reason to suppose Mr Blair and his colleagues cannot lose from a raging health debate. For all its massive majorities in the Commons, this government has from the outset been attended by a pronounced lack of public enthusiasm. More people stayed at home than voted for that historic full second term last June. The party chairman, Mr Charles Clarke, has acknowledged the conditional nature of New Labour's mandate, while Mr Blair himself interpreted it as an instruction to deliver world-class public services.
Indeed, just last weekend Mr Blair said he would accept being turfed-out of office if the NHS isn't "basically fixed" by the next election. "Things are starting to get better and they will be dramatically approved," he told the People newspaper.
"I am so confident of that, let me say this: if the NHS is not basically fixed by the next election, then I am quite happy to suffer the consequences. I am quite willing to be held to account by the voters if we fail," he said.
However if Mr Blair was hoping to win a respite from the daily round of NHS horror stories while a patient public waited for the government's investment and reform programme to work through, yesterday's particularly lurid headlines - and Mr Duncan Smith's resumed attack in the Commons - appeared to confirm the view of the Health Secretary, Mr Alan Milburn, that this issue may indeed dominate all the way to the next election.
Nor is it convincing for them to dismiss particular outrages like the burial of baby James Fernandez below a pile of dirty laundry as one-offs. Or for hospitals to announce a change of procedures to ensure, in those familiar words, that such a thing can never happen again.
The point is that words of reassurance, about lessons learned and mistakes never to be repeated, are so familiar - remember last summer's scandalous discovery of corpses in the unrefrigerated chapel of rest at Bedford Hospital.
The point made so eloquently by Patrick Kelly is that there is always "spin" after the event, and that the apology - in this case apparently coming only after the Sun's disclosures -- can only ever offer the bereaved and grieving "too little, too late."