How 'the black disease' ravaged Glasgow

By the time the triage nurses at Glasgow Royal Infirmary’s A&E Unit examined Andrea McQuilter, her situation was already dire. The 19-year-old from Sighthill was unable to stand and was struggling for breath. She was turning blue, and her pulse was so weak, hospital staff found it impossible to take a reading. Her temperature was low enough to fall into the range of hypothermia. Within 10 minutes, she was showing signs of cardiac arrest. Intensive resuscitation efforts ensued. However, despite the best efforts of the medical staff, Andrea could not be saved and she died before she could be transferred to the intensive care unit.

Due to her unexplained cause of death, a postmortem was carried out. Andrea had been injecting heroin for two years prior to her death and its effects on her were clear to see. She was severely underweight and covered in bruises. On her left buttock was a large abscess underlying an injection site. Her death was attributed to a pneumonia caused by an opportunistic fungal infection that is a frequent cause of death in people with severely compromised immune systems. Within a few days, this would be revised.

It was Wednesday 26 April 2000.

At the same time as Andrea McQuilter was being brought in, 27-year-old Deborah McElvanney sat in a ward upstairs. She would rather have been anywhere else. She was sick of the nurses looking down their noses at her. A heroin user, she had been given methadone in the hospital, but it wore off quickly and the dose was not enough to keep her squared up. She had walked into A&E five days earlier with an injury to her right hand, which she explained away as the result of a fight, although the reality was that she had missed a vein when injecting a few days previously. Her arm was massively swollen above this wound. She was admitted and put on a course of antibiotics. 

While Deborah appeared outwardly well, she was anything but. That same day, her blood and microbiology tests came back, revealing some extremely disquieting results. Her white blood cell count had suddenly gone through the roof and there was apparent muscle damage, suggesting the presence of necrotising fasciitis, the “flesh eating bug”. She was rushed to surgery, and much of the tissue on her right hand, arm, and shoulder, as well as adjacent portions of her torso, was surgically removed in a desperate attempt to halt the progress of the infection. These efforts were in vain, and Deborah died in the ICU the following evening.