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It might sound far-fetched, but officials at the McGill University Health Centre now believe that too many tampons being flushed down toilets in one concentrated area of the superhospital is the main cause of the sewage backups that flooded the birthing centre last August.

When it opened on April 26, the superhospital at the Glen site consolidated onto a single floor women’s clinical activities that used to be scattered on different floors and buildings of the old Royal Victoria Hospital on University St.

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For reasons that made sense clinically, the MUHC decided to house on the sixth floor of the Glen site the birthing centre, ambulatory health, the breast clinic, the newborn nursery as well as the pre- and postpartum units.

But in retrospect, it appears that the MUHC and design-build contractor SNC-Lavalin did not anticipate that the superhospital’s plumbing system would have to handle a higher volume of flushed feminine hygiene products on one floor.