Hepatitis infections tied to ex-nurse

Oh my.....
A nurse spreading hepatitis.

By ALICIA A. CALDWELL, Associated Press Writer Fri Mar 21, 4:35 AM ET

EL PASO, Texas - At least 15 military service members or their relatives are believed to have been infected with hepatitis by a nurse suspected of stealing their painkillers during surgery.
ADVERTISEMENT

The nurse, retired Army captain Jon Dale Jones, was arrested this month in Miami on federal charges of assaulting three of those patients and possession of a controlled substance by fraud.

Federal prosecutors said they believe Jones spread the disease in 2004 during surgeries at an El Paso military hospital by diverting fentanyl — a powerful painkiller often used for anesthesia — from patients to himself.

The outbreak — and the nearly three-year-long criminal investigation that followed — apparently did not prevent Jones from continuing to work as nurse in Texas and at least two other states and Washington, D.C.

Jones, 45, has pleaded not guilty and was released on bond.

"We are confident that when everything comes out in court, he will be exonerated and acquitted," said Jim Darnell, the nurse's lawyer.

Details surrounding the case remain sketchy. It's not clear how Jones allegedly transmitted the potentially deadly disease to his patients or obtained the drugs they were supposed to have received during surgery. Jones has denied using dirty needles.

Court records show the alleged victims include the son of a former Fort Bliss commanding general, an active-duty soldier, the wife of a retired Marine Corps gunnery sergeant and a retired Army chief warrant officer.

Staff Sgt. Ivan James Westrick, 33, of El Paso, was one of those allegedly infected with hepatitis C after a grenade blast claimed his left hand, lower arm and part of his right hand.

Michael Volk, an attorney representing Westrick and seven other infected patients, has filed lawsuits against Jones and the nursing agency that employed him at the Army hospital, claiming the infections caused irreparable harm and forced them to undergo extensive and aggressive medical treatments.

Volk declined to discuss the cases with The Associated Press and rejected requests for interviews with his clients following a federal judge's decision to put those lawsuits on hold pending the outcome of the criminal case against Jones.

Hepatitis C is a a blood-borne disease that can lead to cirrhosis of the liver or liver cancer. It is treatable, but there is no cure. Symptoms vary but can include nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, fatigue, pain and jaundice.

Court records show Jones tested positive for hepatitis C after the outbreak was discovered in October 2004. He was taken off the surgery unit but continued to work elsewhere at William Beaumont Army Medical Center as a civilian contract employee until June 2005. Army officials, who declined to comment on the details of the case, have said it's not clear whether he quit or was fired.

Paul Bracken, an El Paso lawyer representing Columbia Health Care, one of two contract companies Jones worked for at the Army hospital, declined to comment on the criminal and civil cases.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention linked Jones to the outbreak about a month after he left, saying he and infected patients shared the same strain of hepatitis C, according to court records. The FBI launched its own investigation a short time later.

Jones then moved to Washington, D.C., where he was a nurse at Georgetown University in August 2005, remaining there until he was fired in late 2006, according to Marianne Worley, a Georgetown spokeswoman. She declined to say why he was fired, but said the hospital is cooperating with investigators.

Jones next turned up in Florida, where last year he opened his own anesthesiology business, Jones Anesthesia, LLC. He was living there when he was indicted on Feb. 27 by a federal grand jury in El Paso on the assault and drug charges.

It remains unclear how much, if anything, agencies that license nurses in states where Jones has worked were told about the CDC and FBI investigations.

The Texas Department of State Health Services was notified that Jones tested positive for hepatitis C and it, in turn, alerted the Texas Board of Nurses.

It does not appear, however, that disciplinary action was taken against Jones, and his nursing license remained intact until he moved to Virginia. There also was no record of complaints or discipline in other states.

El Paso FBI Special Agent in Charge David Cuthbertson said CDC and Texas health officials were aware of the outbreak before the criminal investigation began. It was up to them to decide if others needed to be told about Jones or a possible public health risk, he said.

Experts said it is difficult to prevent a nurse, doctor or other health professional under investigation in one state from moving to and practicing in another.
[One should always keep this in mind and investigate the medical practitioner one choose to work with but below is a problem]

Most state health agencies will not share complaint information with other states before investigating the allegations internally, said Dr. John Schufeldt, a Phoenix emergency room physician and lawyer who handles malpractice cases.


"It would not be the first time and it probably won't be the last," Schufeldt said of health care workers who move while under scrutiny elsewhere. "

There at it again. Some doctors who are not so conscientious. A case can be made that well, if it saves lives...
The problems is this below

(NaturalNews) Doctors have been widely prescribing drug-coated heart stents for uses not approved by the FDA, according to two studies recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

What are these drug coated stents and what are they supposed to do.

Stents are wire-mesh tubes that are widely used to prop open heart valves to prevent them from collapsing due to cardiovascular disease. They are often used in conjunction with medical procedures such as angioplasty.

In 2004, three years ago, the FDA approved stents coated with medication that makes blood vessels less likely to close again. They do this by suppressing the immune response that may stimulate growth of smooth muscle tissue in the stented area. Because of the effectiveness of this treatment in preventing restenosis (reclosing of the blood vessel), the new stents immediately became wildly popular with doctors. By 2006, 90 percent of all stents being prescribed were of the drug-coated variety, a market of $6 billion.

Now I wouldn't have a problem with this if it was known-from clinical trials and the like to really prevent heart attacks. Have there been trials?

According to the two new studies, in the rush to adopt the new devices, doctors ended up prescribing them for conditions for which they were not approved and their safety or effectiveness had not been tested. The studies found that approximately 50 percent of the coated stents installed in 2004 and 2005 were prescribed for unapproved health conditions.

The use of drug-coated stents dropped off slightly last fall, after they were found to increase the chance of deadly blood clots. However, 70 percent of the stents prescribed are still drug-coated. One of the new studies, which looked at 5,541 patients, found that patients treated with drug-coated stents had their risk of blood clots, heart attack and death more than doubled. Because the overall complication rate was only 2.5 percent even in sicker patients, however, the researchers pronounced the devices safe.

The authors of the second study, which looked at 3,323 patients, disagreed.

"Clinicians should be cautious about extrapolating the benefits of drug-eluting stents over bare metal stents," they said.

blood clots, increased risk of heart attack and death are not good. Everything has risks but the two studies here have conflicting interpretation of the data. I would love to look at all the data (time to pull out the journals).

Zyprexa and Diabetes Lawsuit Settlement

Just passing it on..


http://www.alexanderlaw.com/zyprexa/index.html

If you took Zyprexa* on or before March 2004, and you have developed diabetes, pancreatitis (inflammation of pancreas), ketoacidosis, hyperglycemia, seizures, diabetic coma, stroke, heart attack, amputation of a limb (due to diabetes), severe weight gain, or other medical conditions, you may be entitled to compensation. *(Zyprexa is also commonly misspelled as "Zyprixa, Zyprexia, Zyphrexa, Zypexa, and Ziprexa.")


At least 8000 people have developed serious conditions after using the popular antipsychotic medication, Zyprexa (olanzapine). Eli Lilly has agreed to pay nearly 700 million dollars to settle existing suits from people who have been harmed after using Zyprexa.

This settlement is based on allegations that the Zyprexa label in use before March 2004 did not contain adequate warnings regarding serious potential side effects. In addition, published reports indicate that as far back to the 1950’s, studies tied the use of Zyprexa and similar drugs to increased risk of diabetes, pancreatitis, hyperglycemia and other serious conditions. However, it is alleged that Eli Lilly continued to market Zyprexa without adequate warnings, even in light of this information.

If you or someone close to you used Zyprexa on or before March 2004 , and then suffered from diabetes, pancreatitis (inflammation of pancreas), ketoacidosis, hyperglycemia, seizures, diabetic coma, stroke, heart attack, amputation of a limb (due to diabetes), severe weight gain, or other medical conditions, you are urged to contact the law offices of Alexander Hawes, LLP at 800.921.1776 to speak to an attorney. The call is free, and there is no obligation.

Bad medical board or bad docs?

From AAPS news of the day.

DOCTORS SUE TEXAS MEDICAL BOARD FOR MISCONDUCT - Cites institutional culture of retaliation & intimidation

The entire Texas Medical Board (TMB) and its officials have been named in a lawsuit filed by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS). The complaint, filed this week in District Court in Texarkana, accuses the board of misconduct while performing its official duties, specifically:

1. Manipulation of anonymous complaints;
2. Conflicts of interest;
3. Violation of due process;
4. Breach of privacy; and
5. Retaliation against those who speak out.

Read more

Research Misconduct

From the Annals of Internal Medicine
Harold C. Sox, MD, Editor, and Drummond Rennie, MD

18 April 2006 | Volume 144 Issue 8 | Pages 609-613

In September 2003, the Annals editor, Dr. Sox, received a troubling letter from the provost of the University of Vermont in Burlington. The university had investigated alleged research misconduct by a former faculty member, Eric Poehlman, PhD, and determined that he had published fraudulent research in 3 journals. In its letter, the university referred only to the Annals of Internal Medicine article, a 1995 article on energy expenditure after menopause (1). After consulting the Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, which mandates retraction in such circumstances (2), Dr. Sox published a brief notice of retraction in the 21 October 2003 issue of Annals (3). Soon after, Dr. Poehlman's lawyer asked Annals to retract the retraction until the federal Office of Research Integrity (ORI) had completed its ongoing investigation. After consulting with American College of Physicians legal counsel and top management, Dr. Sox called the ORI. The ORI properly said nothing about the case itself but did say that the letter from the provost at the University of Vermont was sufficient grounds for immediate retraction. In March 2005, the ORI announced its findings: Poehlman had published fabricated research in 10 articles, each in a different journal (4). Furthermore, he had included fraudulent findings in National Institutes of Health grant applications, which is a federal criminal offense. In the end, Poehlman agreed to acknowledge responsibility for fabricating data (5, 6) and pleaded guilty to a single charge of reporting false data in a funded grant application. He awaits sentencing.

Views Vary On Discipline For Doctors

Granted there are many good doctors out there and mistakes can happen. Some medical practitioners however, are downright negligent and consistently so. I call them psychopathic doctors. They are psychopathic in my view because they consistently and knowingly put their patients in harms way, cause harm, and have the cojones to try to shirk responsibility and avoid the consequences. When they do get punished it is often a slap on the wrist compared to the damage they actually cause.

Here an interesting article from the NY times regarding the difficulties of punishing the psychopathic doctor. For the real reason why a brush up on psychopathy may be in order.

Published: January 6, 2001

When the New York State Department of Health said last winter that Dr. Ehud Arbit had operated on the wrong side of a patient's brain, it presented the case as rock solid.

Investigators had interviewed dozens of witnesses at Staten Island University Hospital, where he was chief of neurosurgery, to corroborate the state's findings of various medical misdeeds, officials said. Dr. Arbit had also been accused of making the same error five years ago. The health commissioner, Dr. Antonia Novello, was so sure of her case that she forced the doctor to hand over his license while awaiting a hearing.

But a hearing committee charged with deciding Dr. Arbit's fate saw things differently. It cleared the doctor this week of most of the charges against him, upholding only one serious charge involving a spinal surgery. And though the committee found Dr. Arbit grossly negligent in that case, its penalty -- supervised probation -- stunned and incensed Dr. Novello, who immediately moved to appeal the decision.

How could there be such a disparity between a rare but serious set of allegations by the Department of Health and the ultimate finding of a hearing committee appointed by the commissioner

Read more

This is an old but interesting case because it gets to the heart of the matter regarding really bad medical practice. God forbid you come across some medical malpractice and you try to sort out the mess. Records are always missing or shoddy, usually a sign of a coverup. And if you think it's only in China this occurs think again.

Medical misdeeds are tricky operations

Shanghai Star. 2004-02-12

Before the Spring Festival, an Australian friend called me to say that his medical dispute with a local hospital which had lasted 29 months had finally been resolved.

"The hospital paid me 140,000 yuan (US$16,928) and apologized," Jason told me over the phone.

Exciting news of course, yet my second thought after I hung up forced me to calm down.

It was a hard-won case for Jason and his wife Jane, a Chinese Australian from Shanghai.

The couple had to fly back to Shanghai every two months to fight the dispute which involved the death of Jane's mother in 2001. I had earlier asked how much he had spent on the dispute and Jason, with a shrug, just said: "It's hard to count."

Although he had some Chinese origins, Jason knew little about China but his relentless pursuit to win the dispute has left him with a deep impression of Chinese inefficiency, legal loopholes and bureaucracy.

Almost every time when he came to Shanghai, I would meet him. I also accompanied him to the hospital at the centre of the dispute which was affiliated to Shanghai No. 2 Medical University, to the Shanghai Drug Administration, to the Shanghai Health Bureau, to the university and even to the police.

Jane's mother was hospitalized because of cancer and the couple then found themselves to be the victims of some of the evil tricks in the medical field.

They bought medicine from a drug vendor who was recommended by the chief doctor attending Jane's mother. Actually, such behaviour had been the subject of repeated warnings and has been banned by health authorities.

To make matters worse, they noticed that the medicine bottles for Jane's mother were different from those they bought. It was later discovered that the invoices from the vendor were false. Such strange occurrences convinced the couple that they had purchased fake medicine.

That was not the end of their misfortune. The poor manners and service of the hospital staff annoyed them too. One scene Jason repeatedly mentioned was that when abdominal fluid was being taken from his mother-in-law, the needle fell out of her abdomen onto the bed, and the doctor just reinserted it without taking any disinfection measures.

Jane's mother died a month after entering the hospital. Jane, who used to be a nurse, and who had doubts about the medical treatment, managed to get her mother's files. However, the files were a mess.

Every time, I heard Jason telling about their experiences, I could feel his dismay and I was also ashamed because what he saw was all negative about Shanghai.

In fact, medical disputes are not rare in China and doctors have also been blamed for malpractice in taking red envelopes from patients. Many people may have had similar experiences to Jason.

Yet, Jason might be luckier than them. If Jason had not been an expat, the case may still be unresolved.

The couple's business suffered because of the frequent travel between Australia and Shanghai. When the costs they incurred in pursuing the dispute are taken into account, the amount of compensation is minuscule. How could an ordinary person afford to pay so much to win such an expensive apology?

Jason said Jane was not very satisfied with the result. Although the hospital finally admitted their wrong-doings and punished the doctors concerned, the drug vendor was still nowhere to be found and the investigation into the invoices did not make any progress at all.

I could say nothing and his sigh reminded me of a word used by him - a nightmare.

starcomment@yahoo.com