Leak in the breathing circuit: CO2 absorber and human error.

A couple of reports in literature have mentioned CO2 absorbers to be the cause for breathing circuit leak during anesthesia. Defective canister, failure to close the absorber chamber and overfilling of the chamber with sodalime were the problems in these reports. Among these, the last two are reports of human error resulting in problems. We report a case where despite taking precautions in this regard, we experienced a significant leak in the system due to a problem with the CO2 absorber, secondary to human error.