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Paediatrician David Southall was yesterday struck off the medical register after twice accusing parents of murdering their children. He claimed one mother drugged and hanged her ten-year-old son with a belt, and he infamously interfered in the case of solicitor Sally Clark, accusing her husband of killing their two sons on the strength of a television documentary. Yesterday his high-flying career was in ruins after he was barred from medical practice with immediate effect, and castigated for his complete failure to apologise and his "deep-seated attitudinal problems". "Your misconduct is so serious that it is fundamentally incompatible with your continuing to be a registered medical practitioner," said Dr Jacqueline Mitton, chairman of the General Medical Council's Fitness to Practise Panel. He blushed slightly and took a long gulp of water as he learned his fate. Afterwards he remained defiant and unapologetic, saying he was considering an appeal. "The decisions I took were in the best interests of the children involved," he said. Southall, 59, has gained international renown for groundbreaking research during his career, which took in the University Hospital of North Staffordshire in Stoke, the Royal Brompton in London and hospitals in Wales, the Home Counties, Doncaster, Rotherham and Barnsley. He had already been suspended from child protection work in 2004 over his "high-handed intervention" in the Sally Clark case. He was called before the GMC again over a further series of allegations, which were found proven last month. Five mothers whom he wrongly accused of deliberately hurting, and in one case killing, their children, gave evidence to the hearin Their accounts gave a chilling insight into the consequences of so-called "sleep study" tests that he conducted on 4,500 of his young patients during the eighties and nineties. Police forces in the Midlands, Wales and London are investigating if children were inadvertently harmed or may have died during his experiments, where patients were allegedly deprived of oxygen and given small amounts of carbon dioxide, ostensibly to find the cause of cot death. Here, SUE REID reports on those five tragic cases... BEN MCLEAN Ben was three when his smiling picture appeared in a fundraising brochure for Great Ormond Street Hospital, where he was being treated for an illness affecting his breathing. He was a bright child and was expected to recover and lead a normal life. Today he is 21, goes to a special school and struggles to say a few simple words. He walks with the rolling gait of a drunk, testimony to the brain damage his parents fear is irreversible. Ben spent a year of his childhood in care, taken from his family at the age of five because paediatrician David Southall accused his mother and father of deliberately trying to hurt him. The doctor alleged they suffered from Munchausen's Syndrome by Proxy (MSBP), a theory unproven in science in which parents are said to harm their offspring to gain attention for themselves. Today Dee McLean and her husband David say Ben underwent controversial breathing tests overseen by Dr Southall, when he was deprived of oxygen, and given small doses of carbon dioxide, which left him brain-damaged. As a result of these claims, South Wales Police are investigating his treatment by Professor Southall's medical team at the University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff. Dee, a former nurse, says: "He was a changed child after the tests in 1981. He couldn't concentrate. He couldn't walk properly." It took a year-long battle in the High Court before they won Ben back from care. What other tests were conducted on him during that time the McLeans do not know. But he was never the same child again. LAWRENCE ALEXANDER Lawrence is now 21. He spends most of his days in a darkened room listening to Radio 4. He cannot eat normal food and is 80 per cent physically disabled. At the age of 14 he was struck by muscle weakness which led to his body sustaining severe cell damage usually seen only in cancer patients after chemotherapy. Yet he has found the strength to search through his medical records and discover he underwent tests conducted by David Southall. Lawrence first became ill seven weeks after being born. He would often gasp for air and turn blue: signs of sudden infant death syndrome or cot death. At first doctors thought he was epileptic. At five months he was referred to the Great Ormond Street Hospital. His mother, Janet, recalls: "We were told Dr Southall, a cot-death expert who worked not far away at the Royal Brompton Hospital in Chelsea, could help Lawrence. He was transferred there for one month and Dr Southall began to insist on exhaustive tests. "We quickly became suspicious that Dr Southall was using our son as a guinea-pig and we told him that we were going to take him home." It was then that the paediatrician invited Janet and husband, Robin, to a meeting to discuss Lawrence's progress. "We found social workers from Kensington and Chelsea Council and their solicitors, sent by Dr Southall,' says Janet. "One social worker told me, 'You need help as parents. There is nothing wrong with your child'. It suddenly clicked that we were in a dangerous situation. "They were saying we made up Lawrence's illness - that we were deliberately harming him." Janet was told she must sign papers to give social workers legal rights over Lawrence's care. "I was afraid if I did not allow my son to become a ward of court I would lose him forever." Crucially, she would no longer be allowed to see him at night. Janet, a former nurse, was forced to stop breast-feeding. So was it then, as the Alexander family have told the GMC, that Lawrence underwent tests that ruined his health? Lawrence says: "I believe that my mother and father were labelled as child abusers by Dr Southall because they tried to stop his experiments on me. "We now know about the so-called 'sleep studies' carried out by Dr Southall. "What impact that had on my health we will never know."
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