For the parents of a premature baby who died just after birth at a Chai Wan public hospital on December 15, it must be almost impossible to imagine that their son's final resting place might be a landfill.
But this double tragedy is being played out in Hong Kong in the latest - and what must rank among the worst - blunder involving the Hospital Authority.
On Monday, police and Environmental Protection Department workers will rake through some 8 tonnes of medical waste at the Tseung Kwan O landfill in what people in the know describe as a 'mission impossible' to try to find the newborn's body, which went missing from the mortuary of the Pamela Youde Nethersole Eastern Hospital around December 20.
The Eastern Hospital body blunder came just days after 56-year-old logistics company owner Yeung Tak-cheung died from a heart attack, despite collapsing just outside the Caritas Medical Centre in Cheung Sha Wan.
The incidents happened during a year of relative calm for the blunder-plagued authority, which was set up in 1992 under a landmark management reform of the then Medical and Health Department.
After the body blunder, Secretary for Food and Health York Chow Yat-ngok ordered the authority to deal with 'irresponsible staff' at mortuaries once and for all.
