BY FRED TASKER
At age 3, Sebastian Ferrero was an active, healthy, intelligent boy who already spoke English, Italian and
Spanish and was attending preschool, his parents say.
On Oct. 10, he died at a Shands HealthCare facility at the University of Florida. Doctors say it was
because he was given a dose 10 times too high of a substance used for testing growth hormone deficiency
-- even though the boy's mother was present and questioning the dose as it was being administered.
In his death, Sebastian's grieving parents are praising at least the facility's candor in taking responsibility
and vowing to work with Shands on a foundation to build a ''state-of-the-art children's hospital'' with
safeguards to prevent such mistakes.
In a statement released late Friday, the family said: ``For the rest of our lives we will thank God that we
enjoyed Sebastian fully while he was on loan to us. This tragedy has taught us that we need to live like
him, genuinely and intensely, because we are here just in transit.''
Drug overdoses and other medical errors are a national problem, experts say. Across the country, hospital
patients on average experience one medical error per day of stay, injuring 1.5 million patients a year,
according to a 2006 investigation co-chaired by Dr. J. Lyle Bootman, pharmacy dean at the University of
Arizona, for the Institute of Medicine, a Washington-based research group.
''Hospitals are realizing they must take a stronger stand against errors,'' he said. ``The key is
communication among all the parties involved. We need check-and-balance systems to prevent confusion.''
A 1999 study for the same group said 44,000 to 98,000 people die in hospitals each year from such errors,
at a cost of $29 billion in additional care and lost productivity.
At a Thursday press conference in Gainesville, Dr. Donald Novak, professor of pediatrics and vice
chairman of clinical affairs for the UF College of Medicine's Department of Pediatrics, said: ``We take full
responsibility for Sebastian's death and are very, very sorry.''
Dr. Richard Bucciarelli, interim chairman of the UF College of Medicine's Department of Pediatrics, said:
``We will be most delighted to work with the family on these issues.''
Bucciarelli said the hospital is working out a settlement with the family, but that he couldn't reveal how
much.
In the press conference and a subsequent news release, Novak gave this account of the boy's death:
On Oct. 8, Sebastian, healthy but small for his age, went to the University of Florida Physicians Pediatric