The spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual.

If this is true, I am speechless.

With gangs of rapists and looters rampaging through wards in the flooded city, senior doctors took the harrowing decision to give massive overdoses of morphine to those they believed could not make it out alive.

In an extraordinary interview with The Mail on Sunday, one New Orleans doctor told how she 'prayed for God to have mercy on her soul' after she ignored every tenet of medical ethics and ended the lives of patients she had earlier fought to save.

Her heart-rending account has been corroborated by a hospital orderly and by local government officials. One emergency official, William 'Forest' McQueen, said: "Those who had no chance of making it were given a lot of morphine and lain down in a dark place to die."

Euthanasia is illegal in Louisiana, and The Mail on Sunday is protecting the identities of the medical staff concerned to prevent them being made scapegoats for the events of last week.

"People would find it impossible to understand the situation. I had to make life-or-death decisions in a split second.

"It came down to giving people the basic human right to die with dignity.

"There were patients with Do Not Resuscitate signs. Under normal circumstances, some could have lasted several days. But when the power went out, we had nothing.

As a libertarian-minded person, I support the individual's right to die on their own terms. But this is incredible. I have not seen a corroborating report, so if you find one (or a refutation), please drop it in the comments section.

Update: As of this morning 9/13, I still have seen no mention of this in the US press, though it is carried in multiple outlets overseas. I just now watched as FoxNews discussed the 45 bodies, and said it was unclear how they died, but made no mention of the euthenasia reports. This is being reported across Europe and China, but not here - why?

UPDATE - see here