A baby girl born prematurely Monday as a result of induced labour at a northern Israeli hospital "came back to life" after being pronounced dead by doctors and spending five hours in the cooler at the hospital's cryogenic laboratory, dpa reported.
"In medicine, when we see something like this, we call it a 'medical miracle', but at this point we do not have an explanation," Dr Moshe Daniel, the hospital's deputy administrator, told Channel 2 News.
Dr Rami Moshonov, a senior gynaecologist at a Tel Aviv hospital, told the television station that it was possible that the cold from the cooler had slowed the baby's metabolism sufficiently for it to come back to life.
The baby's mother, in her fifth month of pregnancy, had checked into the hospital in Nahariya, near the Israel-Lebanon border, five days ago for a series of prenatal tests.
The tests indicated that her foetus had no pulse, and doctors scheduled a trimester termination procedure, which was carried out on Monday morning.
Once the procedure was completed, doctors verified the baby, which weighed only 610 grammes, was not breathing, pronounced her dead, and transferred the body to the cryogenic laboratory, pending postmortem tests to discover the exact cause of death.
But when five hours later the baby's father asked to see the body and doctors opened the cooler, the baby began showing signs of spontaneous breathing.
She was rushed to the neonatal intensive care unit and placed in an incubator and put on a respirator.