Luca Spada is suspected of murdering patients by injecting air bubbles

Spada is heard talking to a friend and says that “those poor old men are suffering too much,” and that he enjoys performing these acts. He even added that he needed to repeat the operation again as soon as possible.

The chilling findings led to his immediate arrest. Spada denies the suspicions against him and claimed: “I am a good person and always act according to the required medical protocols.”

The method Spada chose to use is one of the most brutal and deadly out there, even though it seems simple to do. Air injection into the blood circulation, a condition known in the professional language as air embolism, is an operation that causes a mechanical blockage of the blood flow. When air is injected into a vein using an empty syringe, the air bubble moves with the blood stream to the right heart. The heart cannot pump air as it pumps fluid, so the bubble creates a blockage that prevents the blood from reaching the lungs.

The air bubbles can also reach the cerebral arteries and cause an immediate stroke, or the coronary arteries that supply blood to the heart and cause a fatal heart attack.

Death in such cases is very quick and is accompanied by acute shortness of breath, severe pain and complete collapse of the body’s systems within a few seconds or minutes.

Italian authorities are now examining all the medical files of the patients transferred by Spada in recent years, fearing that the number of victims is much higher than is currently known.

The chance of surviving an air embolism as a result of an intentional injection is very low, especially among an elderly population where physiological reserves are limited. The researchers estimate that in over 90% of the cases where a significant amount of air is injected directly into the venous system, usually over 10 ml, the result is certain death.