Ángeles Cruz Martínez
La Jornada Newspaper
Monday, October 20, 2025, p. 6
Invasive mechanical ventilation is an essential tool to save the lives of people in critical conditions. Seven out of 10 survive if they have access to this equipment, while 95 percent of those who do not use it or reject it die, according to information from the National Institute of Respiratory Diseases (INER), a national reference center, and during the covid-19 pandemic, it has become the largest intensive care unit in the country and Latin America.
Hospital specialists acknowledged that there have been cases of people who manage to survive without the ventilator – although they needed it – but when that happens, they are left with severe lung damage, most likely with an oxygen tank to which they must remain connected for a long time or for life.
During the covid-19 pandemic, more than 20 thousand patients were treated at the INER, of which around 7 thousand had mechanical ventilation, that is, they were intubated, and 65 percent survived. This result is comparable with that obtained in any of the best hospitals in the world, INER specialists assured.
They warned about the need for the population to know the tools available in the country to deal with conditions that lead to severe respiratory failure for which the last option is mechanical ventilation.
They remembered those days of the pandemic that overwhelmed medical care capacity around the world. “There was a shortage of everything, including ventilators.” The large manufacturers reserved their production for their own countries and the rest of the world “had to look for the equipment wherever it was available.” It was a global health emergency.
Controversial team
In this scenario, donations of equipment arrived in Mexico, among them, mechanical ventilators of the Philips brand model E30, 2 thousand of which were managed by the Mexican Foundation for Health – according to official information held by The Day–, and they were distributed throughout the country.
Information from INER highlights that this model was designed for the care of obstructive sleep apnea. That is, they were not manufactured as invasive ventilators and had to be adapted to allow tubes to be inserted through the trachea so that patients could breathe. “It was what there was and it had to be used.”
These equipment have been at the center of the controversy due to the legal dispute between Philips and its distributor Healthcare Systems, due to the alleged failures of the equipment and the potential damage to the health of patients.
Although alerts from regulatory agencies in the United States and Europe regarding E30 ventilators and others have been issued since 2021, in Mexico, according to public hospital personnel, just a few months ago the Federal Commission for the Protection against Health Risks began requesting information about these devices, which only had authorization for emergency use during the covid-19 pandemic. The commission has also made visits to hospitals to verify that they have been safeguarded or returned to the distributor.
