Posted on 03/05/2008 7:51:12 AM PST by MizSterious
Washington (AP) The head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says an outbreak of Hepatitis C at a Nevada clinic may represent “the tip of an iceberg” of safety problems at clinics around the country.
The City of Las Vegas shut down the Endoscopy center of Southern Nevada last Friday after state health officials determined that six patients had contracted Hepatitis C because of unsafe practices including clinic staff reusing syringes and vials.
(Excerpt) Read more at nbc11news.com ...
Demaning more volume from our existing health resources (as in universal coverage) will A) Help clean up problems like this B) Stress existing systems more and make these problems more prevalent C) Bush’s fault
Tick, toc, tick , toc ...
Wow, you’d expect to read a story like this in some third world country.
It’s not just the clinics, either. These kinds of things are happening in hospitals, too. What a nightmare.
Hillary will fix it.
Avoid “for profit” clinics, especially those run by foreign trained doctors, or clinics that are owned by a doctor that is not on sight. Many times these for profit clinics are owned by a reputable doctor, but that doctor hires young, inexperienced doctors to work or even run the clinics and pay them very little. At least that is the case at large dental clinics.
Where in the world were these "clinicians" educated that they need to be alerted to this??!!!
6 more Clinics have been closed now and 8 more cases of hepatitis have been confirmed.
Unreal.
Lines are long for people getting tested and also 1,400 cannot be reached, no address.
Make em open the syringe in front of you or refuse
Might work in clinics, but in hospitals, patients are sometimes unconscious or so much in pain they’re not noticing anything—I don’t know what the answer is, but it’s shocking to think this is happening here, where we KNOW better.
Norman Hospital, in Norman OK, had a case similar to this a few years back. Several hundred patients got heptatitis c. The person in charge of the clinic was NOT third world, he was born, raised and educated in the US. So it’s worse than just watching which clinic or hospital you go to. For some reason, some personnel think they can just skip the rules.
this is disturbing.
bttt
My best friend died 2 1/2 yrs ago from cirrhosis of the liver that was a complication from Hep C. They figured she got it from when she was a nurses aid at a local hospital long ago.
Everyone is at risk.
I have had multiple endoscopy procedures done, and in no case is anything like a shot used. They hook up a IV and the only drug used is what the anesthesiologist uses to put you in a very relaxed condition,(LOL)
That's it, just one puncture to the skin and I'm betting this is all about the anesthesia.
They insert the drugs way up on the IV setup, so blood is highly unlikely to come into contact with the rig, that far up to the IV bag. The anesthesia drugs don't come in single dose bottles as the stuff is used according to body weight and need. If the anesthetist reused a syringe, yet changed the needle, I would think the idea was to curb costs, and reusing the same drug jug is common practice with those guys. They don't ever inject directly.
My guess is that if any hep B was transmitted, it came from improper sterilization of the camera rig, which is pretty common place. The older ones are hard to clean and they reuse it continuously.
That's where the problem is, and it can be solved by using a disposable rig, but at a very high cost to the patient and the insurance industry who has to pay for this.
This media fascination with this story, may well cause a doubling or tripling of the cost for the procedure, and many men will be victim to the do good highly profitable lawyers.....Again....and again.....and again....
Never assume that it’s ok to reuse needles, vials, or IV or other equipment without proper sterilization. Period. If you think the cost of proper sterilization is high, wait until the worst happens and someone comes down with hepatitis—and in Vegas, quite possibly HIV as well. Having both makes it almost impossible to recover, period.
I am not concerned about that. What I am concerned about is creating another knee jerk reaction that makes a endoscopy procedure too expensive to do. it is the only way to detect colon cancers before they kill you, and men have been dying from this crap for decades. Some women as as well, but the numbers of deaths in men is very high.
The reason is largely that men do not like things shoved up their orifices, (most anyway) and thankfully, over the recent past, the cost of these procedures has come down enough to make them more common.
If it were not for the anesthesia, we would not do this at all.
If this is radically altered, and the government makes it much harder to do this procedure, the common place aspect will disappear and we will be right back where we started. Cases of hep B is not good, and this is largely preventable, but if it goes too far to eliminate a rare risk, the entire procedure will e affected, and we just will not do it anymore.
Put the premature deaths of thousands up against a few cases of hep B, and you will see my point.
Perfection is something to be strived for, and not intended to be a requirement or mandatory,yet our legal system and government oversight ignores the obvious and continuously screws the pooch while trying to invent or mandate perfection.
Lastly, as I stated in my first reply, there is something wrong with the facts in this story. the facts are missing and imaginations have taken over. I seriously doubt the reusing of a syringe by the anesthetist is the causal factor. It's highly unlikely.
What's more likely, is the normal risk of hep b transmission by the camera rig. Something they have been dealing with since the procedure was invented.
LOL! Yes mommie......LOL!
In no case is the reusal of a needle or IV acceptable, but reusing a vial is, under certain controls.
In this story, there is not one single indication that a needle or IV was reused.
As to anesthetists reusing vials, it happens every single day of the week. They don't directly inject this stuff. It goes into the IV rig at the place designed for it.
This event is a load of crap designed to punish the medical field because of some A'holes idea of perfect medicine.
In the end, sanity may prevail, but not before killing thousands to save one case of hep b.
Typical government behavior.
This is more than HBV. It’s all of the “brands” of hepatitis, plus HIV. And I will restate my opposition to your dismissal of proper sterilization. When I was training to be a nurse (although I ultimately chose another profession), we knew better than to do such things. Treating the lives of patients so carelessly is outrageous. Kneejerk or not, having a lifelong disease that’s not easily cured could have been prevented. It wasn’t. And apparently people like you would rather look at the BOTTOM LINE than the lives of the patients.
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