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ELEVEN years after the case first came to light, the Supreme Court has rejected Dr Juan Maeso’s appeal against a 1,933-year prison sentence. The mammoth sentence was passed on the 67-year-old anaesthetist by the Valencia High Court in 2007 after he was found guilty of infecting 275 patients with hepatitis C and causing the deaths of four. 

  The ruling was welcomed by a spokeswoman for Maeso’s victims, Amparo Gonzalez, who said those she represented had taken the news “with calm satisfaction”, in the knowledge that justice had been done. Counsel for the Prosecution and those representing the plaintiffs applauded the Supreme Court decision. Before Juan Maeso was linked to the high number of hepatitis cases diagnosed in and around Valencia, the divorced father of three was regarded as one of the region’s most distinguished anaesthetists. He was so skilled that he had earned himself the nickname of ‘Porcelain Hands’, because of his gentle touch when giving injections.

Patients grateful not to wince at the hypodermic needle could not guess that hepatitis-carrying Dr Maeso was addicted to opiates and habitually injected himself with a drug, a form of morphine called Dolantina, intended for them. Neither did 275 patients know that they would contract hepatitis through the same doctor who said that his life’s ambition was to control and prevent pain.

Between 1988 and 1997, when Maeso was an anaesthetist at Valencia’s ‘La Fe’ hospital and three private hospitals – the Casa de Salud, Virgen del Consuelo and Quiron clinics – he regularly consumed drugs destined for patients. Towards the end of 1997, doctors employed by companies providing medical cover for Telefonica and Iberdrola employees in the Valencia region noticed a rise in hepatitis C cases amongst patients who had been treated at the Casa de Salud clinic. An official review of hygiene and sterilising methods followed and tests for hepatitis C amongst  the clinic’s employees led to Maeso. He was suspended in 1998 and dismissed two years later, after further cases were detected amongst his patients at the three other hospitals.

After the outbreak was traced back to Maeso, medical staff told investigators they had noticed that some of his patients were not sufficiently sedated during operations. Several of Maeso’s patients recalled that the anaesthetic had appeared ‘not to work’ and some remembered coming round immediately after an operation, while still in the theatre. One patient told how Maeso took a hypodermic from his pocket and, after giving him the injection, walked away with the syringe concealed in his  hand.

When he came to trial in September 2005, Maeso claimed that, far from him infecting patients, he had been infected by one of them – “it happens all the time,” he said – and argued that he was a scapegoat, chosen to conceal shortcomings in the health service.

When a guilty verdict was reached in 2007, Maeso’s defence team launched the appeal which was rejected last week, bringing to an end the nine-year-long case. Insurance companies and the regional health service will meet the compensation costs of 20,374,065 euros, which Maeso was ordered to pay his victims and, despite the apparent severity of his 1,933 year sentence, this will be reduced to 20 years,    the maximum time that can be served in a Spanish prison.