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Wisconsin Hospital Says Surgery Patients May Have Been Exposed to Brain Disease
MADISON, Wis. It was six months ago that the University of Wisconsin Hospital in Madison notified some surgery patients they may have been exposed to contaminated instruments.
The exposure left the patients with a low risk of contracting a deadly brain disorder. The hospital says as of mid-December, none of the 53 patients reported any symptoms of the disorder.
The surgical tools were used on a woman who died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. The other patients had surgery when the instruments were still in use.
Autopsy results came back positive for CJD from the National Prion Disease Pathology Surveillance Center and were reported to the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services and Catholic Medical Center, where the surgery took place.
Earlier this month, New Hampshire officials notified eight patients who may have been exposed to CJD through shared equipment. Five others in Massachusetts and two in Connecticut were also warned of the risk, health officials in those states said. "Though we are not surprised by the test results, we are saddened by the toll this disease takes on families and our sympathies go out to all those affected," said Dr. Jose Montero, New Hampshire's director of public health, in a statement. The initial patient turned out to have sporadic CJD, which occurs spontaneously. It's not the variant form of the disease that causes a human type of "mad cow disease" and is associated with eating beef contaminated with the cattle version of the infection, called bovine spongiform encephalotpathy, or BSE, experts said.
The problem arose because standard hospital disinfection techniques cannot eradicate the prion that causes CJD. A prion is a protein and the type that causes BSE and CJD is misfolded and somehow manages to transform other proteins into disease-causing shape. The initial patient had surgery at Catholic Medical Center in Manchester, N.H., where eight others were also treated. The five Massachusetts patients underwent surgery at Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis, while the two Connecticut patients were treated at the Veterans Affairs Hospital in West Haven, health officials said.
The Massachusetts and Connecticut patients were all treated using a guided imaging navigation system manufactured by Medtronic Inc., as well as the surgical tools that go with it, a company spokeswoman said. Other patients were treated with tools made by different manufacturers. Hospitals frequently share high-cost neurosurgery equipment on a fee-for-use or rental basis, which explains why they were used in more than one hospital. The risk of infection is very low, noted Dr. Joseph Pepe, president and CEO of Catholic Medical Center. The eight New Hampshire patients were notified Friday of the autopsy results.
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Wisconsin Hospital Says Surgery Patients May Have Been Exposed to Brain Disease
MADISON, Wis. It was six months ago that the University of Wisconsin Hospital in Madison notified some surgery patients they may have been exposed to contaminated instruments.
The exposure left the patients with a low risk of contracting a deadly brain disorder. The hospital says as of mid-December, none of the 53 patients reported any symptoms of the disorder.
The surgical tools were used on a woman who died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. The other patients had surgery when the instruments were still in use.
Wisconsin Hospital Says Surgery Patients May Have Been Exposed to Brain Disease - Incredible Health - FOXNews.com
Although the story doesn't say I'm assuming the hospital didn't know the woman had Creutzfeldt-Jakob at the time of her surgery. Otherwise why would the try to sterilize and re-use the instruments?
