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A 54-year-old foster mother has been arrested and charged with criminally negligent homicide after she gave her six-year-old charge a prescription pain killer that killed her.
Taylor Webster complained that her neck hurt, so foster mother Joanne Alvarez gave the girl a baby Motrin. When the pain didn't abate, Alvarez applied a topical pain-killing patch containing fentanyl, a drug not approved for use on people under 16 years old. Alvarez found her foster daughter unconscious yesterday afternoon and the girl was taken to Mt. Sinai Hospital, where she was declared dead.
Alvarez may have taken the fentanyl patch from her job as a health care attendant. The Daily News quotes several neighbors who said thought it was probably an accident and that Alvarez was a caring foster mother. The paper also notes, however, that some residents at the Taft Houses in Harlem thought Alvarez was "strange" and suspected she was drugging the children she cared for to keep them quiet. Interestingly, fentanyl was once packaged as a narcotic lollipop to deliver the painkiller to kids.
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wow, how tragic. People need to take medication much more seriously.
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what an idiot. fentanyl is morphine x100, seriously. its one of the most powerful pain meds, used on cancer patients.
fentanyl lollipops were not intended for kids, but for adults suffering from horrible pain (usually in connection with cancer).
HCA are a joke. My penis can be a HCA.
Fentanyl is more or the less the strongest narcotic pain killer we've been able to think up. Those patches are really intended for people with severe trauma, like burn victims, and are more for pain management when someone is terminally ill. If you notice the does are in micrograms. The lollipops were created for terminally ill patients, who for various reasons got nauseous when they swallowed pills. It's irresponsible to even imply they were thought up with kids in mind, and I'm no big fan of the pharma industry. I would imagine she worked at a shady old age home and stole the patches to sell (they're worth around $60-$80 USD depending). She probably had no idea what they really were. The boxes they come in include a graph that shows basically how high you'll be over a 72 hour period, just to give an idea of how strong that is. It's a sad story.
Hogarty, you write an entire post about how this drug killed a child because she was too young to take it, then you end it by saying that the lollipop was intended for kids? Come on, man.
Could the staff of Gothamist please get their shit together one of these days? Maybe?
This post demands a picture of the perp so we can make appropriate comments.
It's heartbreaking that a child dies so suddenly - but something tells me she would have been a pole dancer in a strip club when she grows up.
[6] I think it was Dennis Quaid who testified b/f Congress last week to discuss how one of his kids was given a blood thinner formulated for adults that was 1000 times (or something) the appropriate level for an infant. The child almost died. Obviously, dosage, delivery, and formulations have a crucial role in the helpfulness or harmfulness of drugs. I thought the lollipop thing was an interesting aside. You obviously did not.
I believe #6, among quite a few others, was trying to point out that the so-called “lollipop” – which looks much more like a Q-tip if you ask me – was NOT intended for children, which is what you state in the post. It’s not a matter of interest, but of accuracy.
What a sad story. RX medications are no joke. Even over- the- counter meds can kill if abused or not used properly. I read last year a high school student who was an avid runner died after applying too much Ben Gay to her legs after races-- it apparently seeped into her blood stream and slowly poisoned her to death.
Fentanyl lollipop kind of looks like it was intended for kids at one point.
See now that would have been a much more consise and useful response to #6.
Such a tragedy - it may well have been an accident but really, if this woman was a healthcare worker surely she knows the dangers of giving young children painkiller medication.
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Very unfortunate to hear this. Sometimes people can really lose touch with reality and with ethics and the results are not always good - Jeremy - tanzanite and tsavorite