The tiny dead body of a prematurely born baby was accidentally thrown into a London hospital linen basket and washed in boiling water at an industrial laundry, officials said today.
In the latest scandal to hit Britain's ailing National Health Service (NHS), the corpse of James Fernandez, who died soon after being born 17 weeks early, was taken to the hospital mortuary but was lost in piles of soiled sheets and shrouds.
The laundry bags were stored next to the cabinet where bodies were kept.
"It is a busy department and with the movement of bodies in and out of that cabinet...the body was transferred," Ms Helen Moffatt, chief executive of Queen Mary's Hospital in London, told a news conference.
The Sunnewspaper, which carried details of the hospital's own inquiry into the incident, splashed the latest controversy to hit the NHS across its front page, with the headline NHS threw our baby away.
Ms Moffatt apologised to James' parents, but admitted the hospital had broken protocol in not keeping the baby's body in a separate box after he died last November.
A spokesman for Mr Blair said he sympathised greatly with the parents in the case, which had been very distressing. But he stressed this was an isolated incident.