Second Nature Care Blog

Kill SuperBugs - Ozone Therapy - Second Nature Care

[fa icon="calendar'] Feb 24, 2015 10:00:00 AM / by Dr. Isadora Guggenheim

Ozone therapy for Superbugs - Second Nature Care

What a nightmare for practitioners and the FDA.  Last week's news of hundreds of patients exposed to drug-resistant SuperBUGS during endoscopy procedures was chilling.  Is there anything that could have prevented this kind of contamination? 179 patients are on high anxiety alert who may have been infected with CRE or carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae.  Can you imagine how they must feel and how their doctors must feel?  I can't.

They were already ill and needed the specialized endoscope procedure to diagnose and treat pancreatic and bile duct diseases.  Serious stuff.  

Even worse is that the FDA seems to have dropped the ball with minimizing risk to patients and protecting practitioners. Scopes were sterilized following manufacturer's standards and that may not have been enough to erradicate the bugs.    

The UCLA Ronald Reagan Medical Center is now going above and beyond the manufacturer's and national standards. Olympus Corp, Fujifilm and Pentax are the major scope manufacturers and their disinfection instructions were approved by the FDA. The complex design of these scopes makes it difficult for proper cleaning. 

Not limited to Los Angeles, Virginia Mason Medical in Seattle, Pittsburgh and Chicago patients were infected in 2012 and 2014. 

More than 500,000 procedures using these scopes are performed in the US each year on a vulnerable population whose biliary ducts are blocked by cancerous tumors, gallstones, etc. 

Topics: Ozone and Prolozone therapies

Isadora Guggenheim, ND, FNP, RN, MS, CNS, LMT, owner of Second Nature Naturopathic Care, LLC
For all appointments: Tel: 845 358-8385 Fax: 845 358-2963 drguggenheim@msn.com