Posted on 07/24/2009 6:45:22 PM PDT by green pastures
MADISON (WKOW) - Some UW Hospital patients may have been exposed to a rare but deadly brain disorder.
UW Hospital officials have told 53 patients they have an extremely low risk of contracting a rare deadly brain disorder after being operated on with contaminated surgical instruments.
The instruments were used on a woman who had surgery on June 11th and died Tuesday from a brain disorder, creutzfeldt-jakob disease.
The hospital got the diagnosis of the fatal disease just this past Monday.
According to hospital spokeswoman, Lisa Brunette, the hospital immediately pulled all the affected instruments and sterilized them again.
Then, through hospital records, identified the patients who would have had open brain or spinal cord surgery since June 11th.
(Excerpt) Read more at wkowtv.com ...
Should they have discarded the instruments?
“Sterilized”??
That’s a hospital to stay away from.
Me too...
Pinging you.
“Ordinarily something like this would be nothing to joke about...”
I know what you mean, but I think we’ve gone beyond ordinary times. With the massive horrid legislation being written (and not read) many of us no longer know whether to laugh or to cry.
As to your suspected cause of the stand-alone headline: ;-)
“I thought that once those instruments were contaminated with that disease they had to be discarded... “
They didn’t know the person had CJD at the time of the surgery (6/11/09) until sometime this week.
They stopped using the instruments then for a time. However they now have re-sterilized the instruments and will continue to use them. (More info at some of the links in #10 on this thread.)
thanks, bfl
How should surgical instruments used on suspected or confirmed CJD patients be reprocessed?
I didn’t think so either, I thought prions lived forever.
No doubt!!! ;-)
I try to avoid them all when possible...
Thanks mewzilla.
All sarcasm aside, CJD is invariably fatal, usually within a year of diagnosis. What kind of surgery was performed on the patient? There was nothing that was going to save her from dying; docs don’t ordinarily operate on ‘inoperable’ cancers, so why were they operating on this woman?
Between this story and the one about the VA hospital in TN, it’s frightening the prospects of contracting diseases because of hospitals’ poor or non-existent sterilization procedures.
FWIW, people are still dying from the human equivalent of mad cow disease in Britain. That made all sorts of news years ago, Now it isn’t newsworthy. It hasn’t stopped.
“UW Hospital insists exposed surgical tools are safe” -
I think someone is lying at that hospital.From what I have read about mad cow and CJD those tools will not even be decontaminated by high levals of radiation.So what the hell are they using to decontaminate those instruments?
Thats a question I wish the Hospital would answer.
I believe they must be heated at over 500 degrees Fahrenheit
for an hour or so. Autoclaving(over 212 F) will not do it from
what I have read. Very strong acids or bases would do , but
we’re talking very strong acids/bases, not vinegar.
I am not sure most hospitals know it...
The other problem is cross contamination inthe pathology departments
where they get the tissue....
From what I understand, they may be associated with
“memory” which is why they are so thermally stable. It may
also be why they “hang” out with nervous tissue. But their
origin, look from what I know biologists don’t know the
origin of viruses, what about a prion which is even less
“living” than a virus.
Some believe that “kuru” , “CJD”, and BSE(mad-cow) are
just variants of the same prion..
Some have also speculated that the disease is much more
prevalent than reported cuz: 1) most old folks are diagnosed
with dementia or alzheimers and die before prion disease
is considered. 2) No one wants to do autopsy on prion
dead folk due to the fact that all areas of potential
contamination probably gotta be incinerated or kept out
of action for a long time to make sure no prions are
left around....maybe they could use a disposable lab.....
Bottom line. don’t eat you’re human relations (see Kuru)!
Wellll, out of 535 congresscritters how many have a brain disorder?
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