[Lockbar]

Brain disorder? Voting for Obama?

[C210N]

Then, through hospital records, identified the patients who would have had open brain or spinal cord surgery since June 11th.

All this intensive record searching sounds expensive. Shouldn't they maximize the benefit by limiting the search to those under, say, 50 years old?

Oh wait, we'll need "reform" to be able to make cost-saving searches like this...

[MarMema]

I am not sure prions can be sterlized or even autoclaved away.

[Cicero]

I read through the original story and I just don’t understand it.

How on earth could 53 patients be threatened with this disease from contaminated surgical instruments?

Are they implying that this hospital would use the same surgical instruments on 54 patients in a row, without ever sterilizing them? Surely sterilization of all surgical instruments has been a routine measure in all American hospitals for at least the past 100 years.

[Old Professer]

Ordinarily something like this would be nothing to joke about, but since nothing is sacred today in war, politics and healthcare, I must say if we just take the headline alone “UW hospital says more than 50 patients may have been exposed to brain disorder,” one could easily conclude that Obama took the sun this morning.

[vetvetdoug]

Normal autoclaving techniques don't touch prions. C-J and its variants cannot be killed or inactivated with all of the routine antibacterial and antiviral methods. I'd hate to think I had surgery right after the instruments had been used on a C-J patient, even if they had been diligently sterilized.

[puppypusher]

I thought that once those instruments were contaminated with that disease they had to be discarded because there is NO way they can be decontaminated.Since that disease is Prion based.Just like Mad cow disease.

[razorback-bert]

I can hear the lawyers stampede all way down here in Texas.

[Cringing Negativism Network]

“Sterilized”??

That’s a hospital to stay away from.

[iceskater]

Pinging you.

[43north]

Wellll, out of 535 congresscritters how many have a brain disorder?

[Waryone]

Someone we knew believed he had CJD. His doctors told him that the only way to be certain would be to actually examine his brain tissue. But they refused to examine the brain tissue because they said the contamination would be so great they would have to incinerate the operating room and everything in it.

If this hospital has not torched and buried those instruments and closed down that operating room, they are continuing to expose patients to prion contamination.

[green pastures]

The latest in the paper is not only are they going to continue using the instruments, they said “the hospital was not required to notify patients or the public but chose to do so in part because notification has become standard practice for hospitals in similar situations.”

Also “Hundreds of handheld surgical instruments that were either used during the woman’s brain surgery or may have been placed in the same pan as those instruments are now being sterilized through an enhanced process that is both hotter and longer than the usual sterilization process.”