A Rome hospital at the centre of a hygiene scare denied on Friday a press report saying that the eyes of dead patients had been "stolen" to feed an illegal cornea transplant market.
Umberto I, the biggest hospital in Italy and Europe, said the allegations were "nonsense" while its director-general, Ubaldo Montaguti, said he had been misquoted by news weekly L'Espresso.
The latest edition of L'Espresso carried an interview with Montaguti in which he was quoted as saying that patient corpses had to be guarded by armed security staff to prevent thieves taking them down in to the hospital's underground corridors and extracting their eyes for their corneas.
But Montaguti stressed on Friday that the guards were needed to prevent the risk of such thefts and "not because such thefts have actually taken place".
"I don't think there could be an underground trade in corneas," he added.
Umberto I's top eye doctor, Corrado Balacco, commented that "this (L'Espresso) story is a disgraceful invention".
"Every year in Italy, we have some 4,000 corneas more than needed for transplant purposes so how could there be an illegal market?" he added.
The head of the European Eye Bank, Diego Ponzin, said that "there are absolutely no grounds for suspecting the existence of cornea trafficking".
"Extracting a cornea is not that quick or simple an operation... And eye tissue is so delicate that unless the eye is removed in a hygienic way by an expert, it would be totally useless for transplant purposes," Ponzin said.
Last week, L'Espresso triggered nationwide hospital hygiene inspections with a shocking report by an Italian journalist who spent a month working undercover as a cleaner at Umberto I.
Using a small hidden camera, journalist Fabrizio Gatti photographed and filmed dirty floors and corridors, hazardous refuse that had been abandoned inside the hospital, staff smoking outside the children's intensive care unit and cleaning mops and brooms that were old and soiled.
Amid the ensuing scandal, the Carabinieri police's health and hygiene unit NAS spent a week carrying out inspections on hospitals up and down the country.
NAS officers swooped on a total of 321 hospitals.
Less than half were given a clean bill of health, with 36.4% reported for breaching administrative norms, 17.4% for breaching building norms and 7.5% for breaching hygiene and cleanliness norms.
Southern regions were found to be the worst, with Sicily, Calabria, Lazio around Rome and Campania around Naples proving the dirtiest.
Of the 24 Calabrian hospitals inspected, violations of various types were reported in 19.
In Sicily, 12 hospitals were found to be dirty and four to be stocking out-of-date medicines.
But Health Minister Livia Turco stressed that overall, Italian hospitals were cleaner than expected after the L'Espresso report.
Ignoring the fact that hospitals were given warning of the NAS inspections, Turco said that "we can trust our hospitals, even though some problems do exist".
She urged citizens to reports any complaints and local governments to ensure that hospital cleaning contracts were respected.
