Fact check: No evidence to corroborate story about Zambian nurse swapping babies

Chiara Vercellone, USA TODAY
·4 min read

The claim: A dying nurse admitted to swapping more than 5,000 babies

An image posted on social media claims a nurse spent her career swapping babies at birth and never got caught.

"Dying nurse on deathbed claims she swapped more than 5,000 babies 'for fun,'" reads an apparent headline shared Dec. 25 on Facebook.

The image, which accrued nearly 700 interactions within three days, is a screengrab of an undated article posted on Relay Hero. The website shares the "stories that really matter," according to its "About Us" page.

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As Relay Hero says in its article, there's no evidence the story is real. An official investigation was unable to corroborate the story, and independent fact-checking organizations have debunked it.

USA TODAY reached out to the Facebook user who shared the claim for comment.

Investigation found no corroborating evidence

While most hospitals have security measures to reduce the risk of switching babies at birth, it still happens.

In September, two 19-year-olds discovered they had been switched when they were born five hours apart in a hospital in La Rioja, a region of Spain. And in 1993, a dying nurse came forward, saying she had been told to switch two newborns years earlier, had refused but had also remained quiet about what she said transpired.

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However, there is no evidence the story described in the Facebook post is true.

"Until further evidence is forthcoming, this story will have to be assigned to the moot category," Relay Hero wrote in its article.

The website cited an April 2019 story published by a website called The Zambian Observer. The four-paragraph article was purportedly written by a maternity ward nurse named Elizabeth Mwewa.

The article claims Mwewa swapped close to 5,000 babies during her time at University Teaching Hospital in Lusaka, Zambia's capital.

"If you were born in UTH between the years 1983 and 1995 chances are your parents may not be your biological parents," the article reads. "I had developed a habbit (sic) of swapping newly born babies just for fun."

Within a few days of the allegations coming to light, the General Nursing Council of Zambia investigated the hospital's staff records.

The agency, which regulates nursing and midwifery, found no midwife named Elizabeth Mwewa had ever worked at the maternity ward, according to The Lusaka Times, a local news outlet. The General Nursing Council also said in a statement there were no records of anyone with that name registered as a practicing midwife, the Agence France-Presse reported.

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The story went viral in 2019 when it first appeared across social media. Several fact-checking organizations, including Africa Check, debunked the claim at the time.

Our rating: False

Based on our research, we rate FALSE the claim that a dying nurse admitted to swapping more than 5,000 babies. An official investigation did not find any nurses named Elizabeth Mwewa who had worked at University Teaching Hospital. The investigation also found no practicing midwives under that name.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Fact check: Zambian nurse did not swap more than 5,000 babies