"As a matter of precaution for the safety of patients, the medicines found in the equipment, worth €20,000, were not administered, which led to them being unusable," said Guarda’s ULS in a statement sent to Lusa.

The ULS board of directors, chaired by the physician Isabel Coelho Antunes, further clarified that "for half an hour the temperature of one of the scientific refrigerators went down and the probe did not signal the error on the mobile phones or to the centre."

"After this half hour everything went back to normal and the probe now works perfectly, though we have not been able to detect the cause of the problem," the note said.

The episode occurred at the end of the month of June, according to the Jornal de Notícias newspaper.