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As autopsies showed a catastrophically high salt level in the bodies of six babies to be the almost certain cause of their deaths, the hospital's officials tried to figure out how the accident happened. Mrs. Lillie Mae Colvin, 29, a Negro practical nurse, mother of three and pregnant, had filled the formula room's canister on Tuesday. She did this from one of two identical 20-gal. galvanized cans standing side by side in the kitchen, their lids marked with stick-on labels that said "sugar" and "salt'' (the salt label was torn). Mrs. Colvin was sure she had filled the canister from the can labeled sugar—but this might have contained salt, perhaps because the lids had been accidentally switched.
Bomb Threats. Binghamton General is owned by the city, and under the law in New York (unlike many states) can be sued for negligence. What the hospital got first, however, was not suits but anonymous phoned bomb threats, and a mysterious fire broke out as well. Moreover, the tragedy is not finished. Even after the salt is flushed out and the baby seems well, parents must wait for as long as a year to see whether it will develop normally. By a mechanism not clearly understood, salt poisoning may cause irreversible damage to the brain. The tablespoonful of salt that many Binghamton babies had swallowed, said Dr. Finberg, was as lethal a dose as 4 lbs. of salt to an adult.
Because ordinary granulated sugar* is widely used in formulas, most hospitals have standard rules that salt and sugar must not be kept on the same shelf or in similar containers. Binghamton belatedly adopted similar rules, and state officials decided to make them mandatory.
* It has the same caloric value as costlier dextrose, which many doctors prescribe. Dextrose, they contend, is better assimilated; being a powder, it is less likely to be confused with salt.