Hospitals: Unsafe At Any Price?

If you think for one minute that your local hospital is some sort of heaven sent charity looking out for your best interest, think again.  They are huge profiteers looking for ways to cut expenses, charge more money and compete with other hospitals for business. What is worse, they are the source of illness and death.

As I pointed out recently, a study at Johns Hopkins revealed that nearly 100% of hospital acquired central line infections are preventable, but, because patients who get infected in the hospital stay longer and rack up bigger bills, the hospitals have no incentive to make their facilities safer.

Now it appears that 18 people may have been infected with a very rare but deadly illness during neurosurgery.

Doctors and hospital officials from Novant Health Forsyth Medical Center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, are notifying 18 neurosurgery patients that they might have been exposed to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a serious and incurable neurological disorder.

According to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, CJD affects about one person in every one million people per year worldwide.

Even though the surgical instruments were sterilized by standard hospital procedures, they should have gone through enhanced sterilization procedures used when there are confirmed or suspected cases of CJD.

In September, 13 patients received similar warnings from two hospitals in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, when a patient who had undergone neurosurgery was later suspected to have CJD.

The hospitals shared the specialized surgical equipment that was used to operate on the patient and continued to use it until the suspicion of exposure to the disease surfaced. [WLWT]