Families of patients exposed to mold at Seattle Children’s awarded damages

A jury has awarded $215,000 to three families of patients who were exposed to Aspergillus mold in Seattle Children’s operating rooms in 2019 — a fungus that has plagued the region’s largest pediatric hospital off and on for more than 20 years. 

The families are the first of 77 plaintiffs to go to trial after filing a class-action lawsuit in King County Superior Court against Children’s, accusing the hospital of failing dozens of patients when it didn’t take the proper precautions to maintain and regularly clean its air-handling and purification systems. 

“The jury’s award confirms that Seattle Children Hospital injured and traumatized its child patients and harmed the parents’ relationships to their children,” attorney Karen Koehler, who’s representing the patients and their families, said in a statement after the Thursday decision. “This significant verdict is a bellwether set of cases. There are 77 other plaintiffs in this class. SCH can do that math.”

Last fall, Children’s admitted, per a court stipulation, it was negligent in exposing patients to Aspergillus in its cardiac and neurosurgery operating rooms. The purpose of this trial, which began about two weeks ago, was to settle damages. The class includes patients who were not infected by the mold, but who had procedures in Children’s operating rooms and underwent months of treatment and blood tests after their exposure. 

While the class initially included 77 families whose children who were exposed to the mold, not all may choose to go to trial.

Some cases involving those infected have been settled, but almost 20 more have yet to go to trial, Koehler said.

In a statement after Thursday’s verdict, Children’s said its “greatest priority is the health and safety of our patients.” 

“We thank the Court and jurors for their work and careful consideration of the evidence in this matter,” the statement said. “Seattle Children’s accepted responsibility for the potential exposure in our operating rooms, and we accept the jury’s verdict.”

While Aspergillus mold is fairly common, something most people breathe regularly without getting sick, hospital patients, especially those with lung disease or weakened immune systems, are at higher risk of death or developing severe infections.

“The entire experience was devastating,” said lead plaintiff Jen Mills, whose now 5-year-old daughter, Mia, was exposed to Aspergillus during her open-heart surgery in 2019, when she was about 6 months old. “We feel so lucky she didn’t get infected. We know other families were not as lucky as we were. But we have to struggle with (balancing) that gratitude … with the betrayal of the system that put us through that.”

Mills and her family, along with another plaintiff family, were awarded $100,000 in damages. The third family was awarded $15,000.

Children’s has since confirmed the mold in its air-handling system has infected and killed patients since 2001, but hospital officials said they did not notice the pattern until 2019. The year prior, six patients had become sick with an Aspergillus infection, one of whom later died, prompting the hospital to close two operating rooms and an equipment storage room for three days. 

The following May, Children’s detected the mold again and closed all 14 of its operating rooms. When they reopened in July, Dr. Mark Del Beccaro, Children’s former chief medical officer, said the risk to patients was “incredibly low” after the hospital installed new air-handling equipment and cleaned and tested the operating rooms. 

Four months later, the mold was discovered again. Children’s announced they’d found two more Aspergillus infections — pushing the hospital to look retroactively at previous cases. In doing so, Children’s found at least 14 of its patients had been infected and six had died (a seventh death was later confirmed) from the mold since 2001. Koehler, meanwhile, says those figures are an undercount “not even close to reality.”

“Looking back, we should have made the connection sooner,” hospital CEO Dr. Jeff Sperring said at a news conference in November 2019. “Simply put, we failed.”

“We are incredibly sorry for the impact this situation has had on our patients and families,” the hospital said in a statement as the lawsuits started to pile up.

In a separate settlement in 2022, Children’s was ordered to pay $750,000 to a family whose 2-year-old underwent a complicated brain surgery and was exposed to Aspergillus, said Andrew Ackley, who’s working with Koehler to represent the patient families.

Although Children’s has admitted negligence in this case, the hospital’s attorneys argued during the two-week trial there was no lasting harm to this class of patients — those who weren’t infected and didn’t die. Families involved in the lawsuit disagree.

Mills remembers feeling wracked with anxiety throughout the ordeal. 

Their initial notification process was “haphazard, surprising and disconcerting,” Mills said, recalling a letter she and her husband received two months after Mia’s surgery that vaguely referenced issues in the operating rooms, but assured them their child wasn’t at risk. They threw the letter away — “We thought it was nothing,” said Mills, who works as an internal medicine and hospice and palliative care physician in Bellevue.

Two weeks later, they got a call from Children’s. Mia would need to start prophylactic, or preventive, antifungal treatment because she had been exposed to Aspergillus. She would also need to be brought in for weekly blood draws over the next four months.

“It was horrible getting her blood drawn,” Mills said. “We had to pin her down. There were tears. These medications are really tricky and require a lot of monitoring, and to take a baby for blood draws, in particular a baby who’s had heart surgery — there’s a number of reasons why that’s very traumatic.”

The thrice-a-day medication could include side effects like nausea, vomiting, rashes, headaches, fever and others, according to the plaintiffs’ trial brief, which cites Children’s treatment plan. While Mia didn’t have severe side effects, she struggled through the treatment, Mills said.

At one point, one of Mia’s blood tests came back positive for Aspergillosis. To Mills and her family’s relief, it ended up being a false positive, but they spent months filled with panic before they felt confident Mia hadn’t contracted an infection, Mills said.

Mia has Down syndrome and another orthopedic condition that has required three more surgeries since the open-heart procedure in 2019. But every time her family brought her back to the hospital, they felt “heavily impacted by the weight of the negligence and the entire process we went through with that treatment,” Mills said. 

Other plaintiff families awarded damages include those of a now 15-year-old who was born with a congenital heart defect who underwent heart surgery and a now 5-year-old with Down syndrome and a congenital heart disease who also underwent multiple heart procedures. Both went through similar treatment after exposure.

According to the trial brief, the family of the 5-year-old girl — who was 5 months old during her first surgery — didn’t know about the Aspergillus exposure until a pharmacist told them that antifungal treatment was included in the baby’s medication list. She, like Mia, struggled through blood draws, but the medication also caused vomiting, bloating and lethargy.

Since 2019, Children’s has said it’s installed new air-handling systems and a new air-filtration system for its operating rooms, but Mills and her family still have concerns.

Mia’s heart has been recovering well since her surgeries and antifungal treatment, her mother said. She started preschool, and she enjoys playing with her two older brothers. She loves her dolls and “Frozen.”

Mia still goes to Children’s, and Mills said they trust and rely on the doctors there. But the family worries whether the hospital administration has done enough to prevent problems like the mold exposure from happening again.

“She’s the light of our family,” Mills said. “And we still have a lot of gratitude for her doctors and nurses, who provide amazing care. … We don’t want to take the hospital down. We want them to be better. We need them. The intention is for accountability and improvement.”