Seven patients at UCLA Ronald Reagan medical center contracted a deadly superbug from an utterly routine medical procedure. Two have died. A third, an eighteen-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.
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