Meningitis From Tainted Drugs Puts Patients, Doctors In Quandary : Shots - Health News ... - 0 views
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14,000 Americans
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alert to illness among patients who have received injections of hundreds of other products
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the number must run into the tens of thousands.
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it was really a mini-pharmaceutical manufacturer, not the pharmacy it was licensed to be.
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1,200 different drugs
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Apparently, all of this has been caused by contamination of drugs by a black mold called Exserohilum rostratum, which is common in the environment but almost unheard of as a cause of human disease.
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For instance, on 13 occasions, they said, New England Compounding shipped out vials of drugs in three suspect lots before getting back results of their own tests confirming the drugs were sterile.
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"indicated a failure ... to sterilize products for even the minimum amount of time necessary to ensure sterility,"
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The firm's premises were not clean
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medications were not labeled with individual patients' names
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he may harbor a fungal infection that could kill him, there's no proof that he does — and there may never be.
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many anxious patients are undergoing painful spinal taps and some are getting antifungal drugs that can damage the kidneys and liver.
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The caution is warranted. This type of fungal infection can smolder for weeks and months before exploding into meningitis or causing massive strokes.
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"It causes a quandary for the infectious disease doc to figure out, well, should this patient receive treatment at all?" O'Connell says. "Should they receive full-boat treatment, which would be an IV? Could they instead just be watched very closely with daily phone calls and visits to the office? We just don't know."
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"Should we do lumbar punctures on those kinds of people so that we can anticipate those that are going to get symptomatic later and beat the fungus to it?" Schaffner wonders. "That is, initiate treatment much earlier, thus averting tissue damage, particularly those devastating strokes."
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When to stop is also uncertain.
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six months, maybe longer.
