CharlesRabb

Seven patients at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center contracted a deadly superbug from an utterly routine medical procedure. Two have died. A third, an 18-year-old boy, fights on for his life after 83 days in the hospital, mostly in intensive care.

All this suffering was preventable. If the CDC and the FDA had alerted UCLA and other hospitals about medical equipment they knew was contaminated, patients would not have been put at risk. The agencies had already watched the same lethal problem unfold in Chicago, Seattle and elsewhere, but they swept it under the rug.


Imagine having a long flexible tube with a camera on the end threaded down your throat to treat gallstones, ulcers and the like, something half a million patients undergo every year. You assume it’s clean. But these reusable devices — a special type of endoscope — have a design flaw that prevents thorough cleaning. The result is that germs lurk inside the device. That’s what happened in L.A., where as many as 179 patients were exposed to a particularly deadly germ called carbapenem-resistant bacteria. The CDC nicknamed it “nightmare bacteria” because few if any antibiotics work against it, and close to half the patients who get it die.

UCLA didn’t start using the defectively designed scopes until June of 2014. That’s six months after the CDC knew that 91 patients in a suburban Chicago hospital had fallen victim to the same problem. The CDC responded to the Chicago outbreak with secrecy and inaction, doing nothing more than issuing a report in January of 2014 that conspicuously omitted the model number or manufacturer of the scope. At the time, I called the CDC to press them and was told it was the Pentax 3490 TX, information doctors and hospitals everywhere should have had. The report also referred to “hospital A” instead of naming the Chicago-area hospital and never mentioned that some infected patients died.

What did the CDC recommend in response to the Chicago outbreak? It lamely suggested that any other hospital experiencing an outbreak “should consider the possibility of endoscopic t***smission.” That’s not prevention, just after-the-fact explanation. So hospitals are supposed to wait until after patients get sick and then look at their medical devices? That’s crazy.

The CDC also stifled news about an outbreak in Seattle, where 32 patients at Virginia Mason Medical Center contracted the same superbug from similarly contaminated scopes from 2012 to 2014. There, 11 patients died.

Just as troubling, the FDA — supposedly responsible for the safety of medical equipment — stayed mute as these outbreaks popped up across the country. For three years, that agency has been sitting on at least 75 reports of patients endangered by these contaminated devices.

Finally, this January the FDA made the underwhelming announcement that the problem is “on the agency’s priority list for guidance documents we intend to publish in 2015.” It noted that “effective cleaning of all areas” of these devices “may not be possible.” Too little too late for the victims in L.A. and elsewhere.

The agency now says it’s working with the three manufacturers — disclosed as Pentax, Olympus and FujiFilm — on a solution. In the meantime, it issued a stunning statement that the benefits of the procedure outweigh the risks of infection. Really? That should be for patients and their doctors to decide. The FDA had an obligation to inform them of the risk. It failed big time. Our FDA and CDC bureaucrats have a lot of explaining to do to the families grieving in L.A. right now.

Superbugs are making it increasingly dangerous to go to a hospital. The New York area has been the epicenter for this carbapenem-resistant “nightmare bacteria” for over a decade. Hospitals here are plagued with it. That’s bad enough, but when government health agencies dawdle and obfuscate, the risks to patients increase. We’ve seen it at the Veterans Administration, and now we’re seeing the same pattern of deception and bureaucratic dysfunction at the CDC and the FDA. Like at the V.A., heads should roll to excise the rot.

skott Loc: Bama

It is true, but we caused it by using antibiotics. We have to deal with it. The alternative was not using antibiotics and watching many Americans die.

AuntiE Loc: 45th Least Free State

You sentence concerning antibiotics is missing one word, overused.

Antibiotics per se are not the issue. It is people's wish for instant resolution to every problem, pharmaceutical companies and physcians training. Rather then allowing the body's natural defenses to work, which can take time, people rush to their physician for a pill to make them well...now. There are many times it is best to let an illness run its course. Your body then builds an immunity. This is not to say antibiotics do not have a place; however, overuse can build resistance for future illnesses.

skott Loc: Bama

Maybe, maybe not on the overused. Probably though.
When we did let the bodies' natural defenses work, we had a much lower life expectancy. Personally I would be dead and my daughter would be definitely dead if not for antibiotics. So, it is hard to determine overuse. And, as capitalists, we want instantly well workers to make the engine run at peek performance.
There is the distinct possibility that we need some other type of antibiotic overall, say a sulfa drug.

AuntiE Loc: 45th Least Free State

I am, by no means, discounting antibiotics. I am saying we need to give our bodies a chance to use its defenses. For decades, parents were encouraged to give fever reducers at the first sign of a fever in their child. Golly gosh, they finally figured out to make the child comfortable and let the fever fight the bug. Now, the standard is fever reducer when the temperature reaches around 100 to 101.

Well...well...you hit the magic words, sulfa drug. It is very very old school and MOST physcians refuse to prescribe it. Old story..I had pneumonia several years ago. The antibiotics they prescribed did ZIP And ZERO. The urgent care center would not prescribe sulfa, which I asked for. I finally called a physician in PA, I had seen once before. He is open to listening to patients. He called in a prescription for large dose sulfa medication. I was well on the way to full recovery within thirty six hours. There are people who cannot take it; however, for many many years it was the medication of choice.

skott Loc: Bama

We don't use Sulfa, because of small chance of an allergic reaction.

Missouri Loc: Cherokee Reservation

When the “6 Ridiculous Lies You Believe About the Founding of America” was posted May 15 by Cracked.com is started something of an Internet sensation; and a spike in people searching for things like “who discovered America?” More than 1.5 million people have viewed the story thus far.

So we’ve decided to go a step further and offer our own take on their six myths, see where they got their information and see what else we can find.

Myth number six says “The Indians Weren’t Defeated by White Settlers,” it instead says Native Americans were wiped out by a plague.

This plague was smallpox, something Native Americans had never seen because it came from living in close proximity to livestock, something farmers in Europe had been doing for thousands of years.

Cracked.com sited a PBS series titled “Guns, Germs and Steel” based on the book by Jared Diamond that details how Europeans brought that disease and others like the flu and measles with them, k*****g some 90 percent of the Native American population between the time Columbus showed up and the Mayflower landed.

“More victims of colonization were k**led by Eurasian germs, than by either the gun or the sword, making germs the deadliest agent of conquest,” says PBS.org.

And reports of the British then using biological warfare to gain an edge in subsequent battles against the American Indians abound. One of the most prevalent examples of its use came from Lord Jeffrey Amherst, who was commanding general of British forces in North America during the final battles of the French & Indian war (1754-1763). The town of Amherst, Massachusetts was later named for him, as was Amherst College.

Historical stories point to Lord Amherst requesting that smallpox infected blankets be sent to the Indians, like this one in Carl Waldman's Atlas of the North American Indian about a siege of Fort Pitt by Chief Pontiac’s forces during the summer of 1763: “Captain Simeon Ecuyer had bought time by sending smallpox-infected blankets and handkerchiefs to the Indians surrounding the fort—an early example of biological warfare—which started an epidemic among them. Amherst himself had encouraged this tactic in a letter to Ecuyer.”

To push their point home, the Cracked.com post sites the book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann in which Giovanni de Verrazzano, an Italian sailor, describes first seeing the East Coast of North America in 1523. “He observed that the coastline everywhere was ‘densely populated,’ smoky with Indian bonfires; he could sometimes smell the burning hundreds of miles away.”

The Cracked.com post says there were between 20 million and 100 million people here before the plague, and the entire population of Europe was 70 million, so let’s face it, the settlers couldn’t have defeated the Native Americans without the diseases they brought with them, especially if the Vikings hadn’t been able to before them. Read more about that in yesterday’s post, “American History Myths Debunked: Columbus Discovered America.”


Read more at http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2012/05/20/american-history-

skott Loc: Bama

I see your story and agree with alot of it, but what was your point?

AuntiE Loc: 45th Least Free State

I cannot use regular penicillin; however, can use derivatives. I firmly do not believe anyone should take a medication which will cause you an allergic reaction.

Indirectly, my point was physcians need to listen to their patients. I have lived with my body. I know what has been successful during times of illness. They do not. They know what the pharmaceutical sales rep tells them.

As a busbybody side note..keep a list of the antibiotics which worked successfully for you and your daughter. They are a known fact and you may want to stick with what has been successful rather then try the, supposed, newest and greatest.

skott Loc: Bama

My daughter was a super preemie. She got Cypro in the NICU. It was Staff. They treated first, and asked questions later.
I am allergic to Penicillin and some others, but some work.
My doctor listens to me. He lives outside of the city, but I travel to him.

Missouri Loc: Cherokee Reservation

Antibiotics might not be the only cause of certain superbugs.

Missouri Loc: Cherokee Reservation

The man fell ill over the next two days, went to a doctor on the third day, was hospitalized and died of a heart attack 11 days after becoming sick, the CDC said.

While the man was hospitalized, test results for many infectious diseases came back negative, the press release said. A blood sample was sent to the CDC, which determined a new v***s had been discovered, the press release said.

The man's symptoms included fever, tiredness, rash, headache, other body aches, nausea and vomiting, the website said. The man had low blood counts for cells that fight infection and help prevent bleeding, the website said.

Though the CDC only has one case to work with, the agency said "it is likely that Bourbon v***s is spread through tick or other insect bites."

The CDC recommends people protect themselves by tick bites by using insect repellents, wearing long-sleeved shirts and pants, avoiding bushy and wooded areas and checking for ticks after spending time outdoors.

The Bourbon v***s is part of a group of v***ses linked to tick or insect bites in Europe, Asia and Africa, the CDC said.

This is the first time a v***s in this group, known as thogotov***ses, has been known to cause illness in the United States, the CDC said.