Before dawn on Wednesday, a mother in Islamabad handed her newborn to a nurse and went to rest. By breakfast, she was standing in a corridor thick with smoke, asking strangers where her baby had been taken. Nobody could tell her. One father, Mudasir, said afterwards that every door of the ward was shut except one, and that there was no fire security in the ward at all. Fourteen newborn babies died when fire broke out on the third floor of the Mother and Child Centre at the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences.

Only one infant was pulled out alive. These were children who had survived birth, survived their first fragile days, and were killed by a building.

The immediate cause is not mysterious. Health Minister Mustafa Kamal said an air-conditioning unit exploded in the children's intensive care ward, and that the oxygen present in the ward made the fire spread faster. Anyone who has worked a neonatal shift knows what that combination means. Oxygen does not burn, but it makes everything around it burn ferociously. A ward saturated with oxygen and wired through decades-old electrical circuits is not a hospital ward. It is a furnace waiting for a spark.

The response was also not mysterious, because we have all seen it before. Condolences from the President and the Prime........

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