SAN JOSE, Calif. _ After a neurologist determined that Jahi McMath was alive and actually getting better, based on videos of the teenage girl left brain dead after a failed surgery at Children's Hospital in Oakland, the facility's administrators released a statement late Monday disputing the doctor's findings.
The saga of Jahi, who is at the center of a worldwide debate over end-of-life procedures, was back in the news this week after Dr. Alan Shewmon, a professor emeritus of pediatrics and neurology at the University of California, Los Angeles, said he studied the videos and found the girl to be alive and responding to simple commands. His findings were part of a court document in the McMath family's legal struggle to keep Jahi from being taken off of life support.
Melinda Krigel, spokeswoman for the UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital, said that its doctors' initial assessment that Jahi was brain dead has not changed, no matter what Shewmon says.
"UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital Oakland deeply empathizes with the family of Jahi McMath," the hospital said in a statement. "It stands by its position that Jahi McMath fulfills the legal diagnostic criteria for brain death as established by the Guidelines for the Determination of Brain Death in Infants and Children."
It said that the brain death evaluations made by three doctors and ratified by a judge in 2013 were accurate and final.
"The plaintiffs' counsel has agreed that Jahi McMath fulfilled the neurologic criteria for brain death when she was declared brain dead and deceased in December 2013," said the statement. "Jahi McMath has not undergone a brain death evaluation pursuant to accepted neurologic criteria as set forth in the Guidelines since she was legally declared deceased in December 2013. The videotapes do not meet the criteria set forth in the Guidelines."
In an attached court filing responding to Shewmon's findings, the hospital says the doctor's claim is wrong.
"The plaintiffs believe that sometime in the spring of 2014 J. McMath managed to "reverse" her death," said the filing. "They believe that J. McMath no longer fulfills the criteria for brain death. Yet plaintiffs failed to provide any reliable and competent medical evidence that supports their belief that she is not dead. Nothing has changed since J. McMath's body was discharged to her mother's custody in early January 2014."
