Interview With Dr. Michael Fox On Lucy Letby Air Embolism

Dr Michael Fox, who qualified in 1976 and spent 15 years in the Royal Navy including periods at the Institute of Naval Medicine and the Submarine Escape Training Tank at HMS Dolphin, brings unique expertise in air embolism to bear on the prosecution's theory. He explains that intravenous air cannot reach the cerebral arterial circulation in a baby without a right-to-left cardiac shunt — which was never alleged. Intravenous air will froth in the right ventricle and be filtered by the lungs, producing frothy blood visible at post-mortem; the absence of this finding in the Thirlwall documents is, he argues, fatal to the diagnosis. The Hsu Li and Tanfield paper cited by Dr Evans actually describes pulmonary air embolism arising from over-ventilation, which is entirely different from intravenous injection. Fox also notes that post-mortem gas can arise naturally from decomposition and gas-producing organisms, particularly relevant given the sewage contamination at the Countess of Chester. He describes how the Navy's clinical experience of cerebral arterial gas embolism confirms that only arterial, not venous, air causes the neurological damage claimed.