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Investigate Seattle Children's Hospital's Cruel Cover-ups and Nationwide Clinical Lab Frauds

1. The SCH Care

On April 9, 2013, following Jianhua’s primary care physician’s direction on his unexpected weight gain after a fever, his parents took their 7-month-old son to the Seattle Children's Hospitals' (SCH) emergency department (ED). The ED doctors kept Jianhua for overnight observation after an ultrasound confirmed his liver was normal; sadly, they neglected to take care of his nutrition. Around 3:00am on the 10th, his blood work showed acute liver failure (ALF), but the ED did nothing but wait; near 6:00am, a critically low glucose, hypoglycemia, happened. 

Jianhua (nickname Longlong) in SCH
Jianhua (nickname Longlong) in SCH

Overnight hypoglycemia indicates a fatty acid oxidation deficiency (FAOD). The ED rushed Jianhua to the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU); however, both the ED and the PICU failed to follow the procedure to order the required labs for this crisis. By the morning of the 12th, another critical hypoglycemia, 33 mg/dL (SCH normal range > 60 mg/dL) happened again because they missed his glucose monitoring. This time, they did take samples for the required labs - ­blood for acylcarnitine profiles and urine for organic acids; doctors can use them to differentiate which fatty acid oxidation enzyme causes the hypoglycemia. Wickedly, when the PICU director was in charge, they replaced the blood specimen for the lab with one obtained 5 hours after the crisis to hide Jianhua's metabolic condition, and then continued giving him a fatty formula to poison him over weekend. The PICU did nothing as Jianhua’s blood ammonia increased to 90 µmol/L (SCH normal range < 33 µmol/L) by 8:00pm on Friday. They also stopped requesting newborn screening (NBS) data, which are acylcarnitine profiles using dried blood spots from a newborn's heel after overnight stress, to hide the diagnosis. While the PICU director was in charge of Jianhua’s care, he never spoke a single word to the parents.

The liver specialists took over Jianhua’s care from the PICU after his parents, against the PICU director's direction, let the nurse replace Jianhua’s formula with glucose when they observed his blood ammonia increasing to toxic levels. The doctors denied FAOD and said a liver biopsy would reveal the etiology, or cause, of his injuries. But when they saw the severity of his steatosis, which is fat infiltration in the liver, caused by his acute starvation and FAOD, the biochemistry lab immediately cancelled the urine organic acids lab ordered days before. The doctors did not follow the normal procedure to deliver a pathology report on the 18th, the biopsy surgery date; instead, they used a new pathologist to create another report, claiming that Jianhua had scant steatosis and established injuries instead of new ones. They did not treat his recoverable acute injuries; instead, they tried two diets, one formula only, and the other with carbohydrate. A high carbohydrate, low fat diet is the standard diet for FAOD patients, but they prescribed the formula-only diet after they observed that it would gradually increase poisonous blood ammonia level. They put Jianhua on the liver transplant waiting list, discharged him, and told his parents that he would come back for a liver transplant in a month. 

Surgical pathology picture (Severe steatosis, white, in his liver)

But that didn’t happen. After the discharge, his parents added carbohydrates to Jianhua’s diet and his labs improved. However, he was losing weight (which was normal for victims of acute starvation, but his parents did not know that) so the SCH liver specialists took advantage of the opportunity and convinced his parents to use the prescribed formula only, without additional carbohydrates. Slowly, Jianhua was getting weaker and weaker. His parents realized his deteriorating health must be related to fat metabolism when they had to rush him back to the SCH ED after increasing the proportion of fat in his diet.

In April 2014, the parents showed a SCH metabolic specialist the highly elevated C16, 2.46 µmol/L (SCH normal range <0.24 µmol/L) in Jianhua’s NBS, which indicates a defect in his enzymes for transporting fatty acids into the mitochondria. This specialist also confirmed that Jianhua had abnormal elevation in an early urine organic acids lab, which indicates a defect in fat oxidation enzymes; but he denied FAOD and directed the parents to stop feeding Jianhua low fat diets. The family realized that SCH had no mercy on their son’s life and decided to leave.

During the SCH liver transplant team's care, they were continuously monitoring his blood ammonia levels. No other hospitals measured it.

2. Medical Kidnapping

In October 2014, the Washington State Child Protective Services (CPS) received a report from a SCH doctor alleging that Jianhua’s parents had abused or neglected their child. In her first house visit, the social worker prohibited Jianhua’s parents from taking their son to seek medical opinions outside of Washington State. The parents asked if CPS could investigate SCH’s crimes. She told them the CPS would only take cases filed by institutes, such as hospitals and schools. To investigate a hospital, they would have to hire a lawyer by themselves. The parents contacted almost all medical malpractice firms in Washington, but no one would take the case without a FAOD diagnosis - they said the investigation would be prohibitively expensive and people wouldn’t sympathize with Jianhua since he doesn’t have visible injuries. The CPS found SCH’s allegation unfounded; thus, the SCH’s second kidnapping attempt failed. The first medical kidnapping was putting Jianhua on the liver transplant waiting list to keep him under SCH’s control – this succeeded.

If SCH’s second kidnapping had succeeded, then a foster family would follow the SCH doctors’ directions, giving Jianhua a “normal diet”, which would contain too much fat for him and poison him. Many children are murdered by the American healthcare system through the CPS in the name of protection. The doctors file claims against the victims’ parents, the CPS takes the children away and sends them to foster care, their parents cannot sue the hospitals for losing parental rights, and the innocent children will likely die mysteriously. These evil crimes start from the doctors: instead of using their expertise to care, they poison, murder, and medically kidnap patients, including infants, who cannot even speak a single word.

A 40-year study shows that the association of disability with abuse and neglect is weak; however, the percentage of foster children with significant health needs is more than twice that of children in the general population according to Pediatrics. Without doctors’ false allegations, there would not be so many children with health issues torn from their parents. At any given time, there are around 424,000 children under foster care in US and about half of them live in nonrelative foster care. 14% of the children in foster care will languish there for three or more years, and their death rate is 6.9 times that of those in parental care.

The federal and state governments deliberately ignore these crimes; they will prosecute anyone causing hospitals monetary loss, even to death, i.e. former SCH nurse, Kimberly Hiatt. Some investigators were even murdered. In 2010, former Georgia senator Nancy Schaefer was assassinated; before her death she published the report “The Corrupt Business of Child Protective Services”. Former firefighter and federal investigator, Bill Bowen, who worked closely with Schaefer, was murdered as well. The trailer of his documentary film “Innocence Destroyed” was released on YouTube a year before.  

The American media will not report these crimes. They are waiting, just like the hospitals. If the victim dies, they will jump out to defame the victim’s family. They will cover up the murders, like Nancy Schaefer’s death. In the span of nearly ten years, no media has been willing to report Jianhua and his family’s suffering.

Instead, people with special interests in healthcare use media propaganda to paint the CPS as a scapegoat for medical kidnapping and the foster families as those profiting from the victims. The truth is that every medical kidnapping starts in a hospital and the hospital is ultimately profiting the most, collecting Medicaid or insurance money from every crime they commit. Whenever a mistake is made or negligence occurs in a hospital, a nurse or doctor typically notices it first, as in Jianhua’s case. After the SCH doctors learned of their mistake, none of the SCH medical directors attempted to treat Jianhua; instead, they directed crimes, poisonings, kidnappings and murders to evade liability.

3. Nationwide Coverups

On April 30, 2013, 12 days after his surgical pathology lab, GeneDX, a genetic testing company, reported Jianhua’s signature variant, ACAD9:c.988A>C, which was novel in the USA, to the NCBI ClinVar of National Institute of Health (NIH) as benign. SCH used the publicly available database ClinVar to make a diagnosis for Jianhua impossible.

Through Best Doctors, doctors of UCSF Benioff Children’s GI department, Massachusetts General Hospital’s pathology department, and Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago’s metabolic department, reviewed Jianhua’s medical record and NBS. They could not determine an etiology for his liver injuries and even claimed that his NBS was normal even though his C16 is about 10 times normal maximums. Doctors from the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC refused to do an ACAD9 enzyme activity test and denied that Jianhua had FAOD on behalf of the pediatrics and genetics department, claiming that Jianhua’s NBS is abnormal and they only test patients with normal NBS values. Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center Molecular Genetics lab only reported the ACAD9:c.988A>C variant although they found many more. Case Western Reserve University CIDEM lab deliberately used a wrong reference in the enzyme activity test to hide Jianhua’s CPT2 deficiency. The ACAD9 and CPT2 genes control the production of 2 of the 19 known fat metabolism enzymes. The doctors were using one FAOD to deny the other, using their knowledge and control over diagnoses to cheat Jianhua’s family. Baylor College of Medicine Medical Genetics lab even emphasized an auto-immune variant in Jianhua’s whole exome sequencing. This variant could easily be used as an excuse if Jianhua were to unfortunately die after a liver transplant—deaths from organ rejections are well known, after all. All trust the family had in the US healthcare system vanished.

Some courageous doctors in CCHMC did extensive screening tests, and the results show that Jianhua’s immune system is normal and that he has FAOD; however, their work could not lead to an FAOD diagnosis because of the overwhelming fraudulent evidence mentioned above.  Even the CCHMC pathologist left after she simply asked for Jianhua’s NBS.

4. Our Claims

Without the diagnoses, or attorney’s help, the family contacted SCH in 2015 for compensation, offering SCH the right to explain what caused the injuries in exchange. SCH hired Sedgwick Claims Management Services to do an investigation. Sedgwick denied SCH’s responsibility for the injuries, the family’s claims, and the family’s request for the 3rd party investigation materials, stating that the materials belong to SCH, who paid them.

Jianhua suffers permanent injuries to his liver, pancreas, heart, and brain from the negligence and poisoning, and he receives no compensation because of the cover-ups. He follows a special diet; he has frequent skin peeling on his hands and feet, eye infections and styes often, headaches every day, sickness very often, and he experiences metabolic decompensation once in a while. These have an impact not only on his life, but also on the lives of his family members. The whole family worked to improve his physical and mental health, which took so much effort that his mother had a miscarriage in 2014, and life was so difficult that his grandma returned to China a year later. He was so weak that Washington’s lack of sunshine threatened his life, making him sick throughout the winter and spring. In 2019, Jianhua and his family relocated to California.

Now, the family is finally ready to ask, again, that the federal and Washington, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas state governments jointly investigate the negligence, poisoning, attempted murder, medical kidnapping and nationwide coverup. They ask for an investigation to address all aspects of Jianhua’s case, particularly the questions below:

  1. Test and report Jianhua’s CPT2 and ACAD9 enzyme activities at 37°C and 41°C and compare them to that of a normal person.
  2. How did Jianhua’s organs get injured, especially his liver, pancreas, heart, and brain? How will these injuries affect his diet, extremities, activities, and life quality and expectancy?
  3. The SCH liver transplant team prescribed a poisonous diet for him, hid his diagnosis, and planned a liver transplantation in 30 days. Please investigate and punish this crime.
  4. The SCH PICU replaced the blood specimen in Jianhua’s acylcarnitine profile, stopped the request for his NBS, and then continued giving him a fatty formula to poison him. Please investigate and punish this and other similar crimes that happened in the SCH PICU.
  5. The SCH surgical pathology lab must release all forms of medical materials, including planning, personnel, the use of his two liver tissues, access records, notes, etc., instead of just a manipulated, late report. Please investigate and punish this organized crime.
  6. The SCH biochemistry lab used a made-up MCT to misinterpret a urine organic acid (UOA) lab and cancelled another one’s results right after they saw the biopsy. Please investigate and punish this crime.
  7. Doctors of the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburg denied an FAOD possibility on behalf of the department, and refused to do the ACAD9 enzyme test. They claimed that the test was unnecessary even though they knew Jianhua’s NBS values were abnormal. Please investigate and punish this intentional cover-up.
  8. Case Western Reserve University lab used a wrong reference to deny Jianhua’s CPT2 deficiency. They refused to change their conclusion even after correcting the error. Please investigate this intentional cover-up.
  9. Both Baylor College of Medicine and CCHMC sequenced Jianhua’s ACAD9 and CPT2 genes. They did not report the well-known CPT2:c.1102G>A variant, but only reported the patient signature ACAD9:c.988A>C variant while hiding many other variants. How can clinical labs abuse the NIH ClinVar database, using it not to help diagnose him, but to mark his variant as “benign” when it matches his symptoms? Please investigate and punish these systematical crimes.
  10. The family signed with SCH liver experts for a pediatric acute liver failure (PALF) study using Jianhua’s biological and genetic materials. Please release the outcome of the research based on his specimens, did they use his biological material for the GeneDX genetic test?
  11. Release Sedgwick investigation materials to the public, especially the questions they asked and how the professionals answered the questions. The public will judge if hiding the evidence of hospitals’ killing infant patients has become a profitable business in the United States. 

After the investigation, the family asks that the federal and state governments grant the family a statute of limitations (the deadline for filing a lawsuit) long enough to file against any entities that committed crimes, helped the coverups, or failed their responsibilities. Withholding diagnoses and covering things up are crimes, you cannot use crimes to conceal crimes to abuse the statute of limitations. Furthermore, many doctors’ insurance companies do not cover injuries that doctors cause intentionally. Such insurance rules are fundamentally evil, sacrificing the victims to protect the criminals, and unfortunately are a cornerstone of American healthcare. The family asks for doctors’ insurance companies to stop using these loopholes to deny victims their rightful compensation.

The government has failed American families badly. The US child mortality rate is 76 percent greater for infants and 57 percent greater for children ages 1-19 than that of other wealthy nations despite greater per capita spending. Over a fifty-year study period, over 600,000 child deaths could have been avoided – the rate has now increased to about 20,000 preventable deaths per year, half of which are infants. If the government won’t investigate this thoroughly, we don’t see the necessity of a government like that. Nancy Schaefer, Bill Bowen, and many innocent lives would have died in vain; it is a crime against humanity, a success for the criminals, and the criminals will carry on.

Key Figures in Understanding Medical Murder

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