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.
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.
Since I have been in practice, I have recommended patients to get general endoscopy to determine a specific diagnosis. The patient has overwhelming symptoms and my training urges me to refer out to the specialist for diagnosis confirmation. Now, I will have to call the gastroenterologist and ask several questions about their reprocessing to disinfect or sterilize reusable devices. We all want to be "green", but this really puts a clinical snag in the picture.
My question is this - "What about using ozone to sterilize the equipment?" Ozone is working well for our patients with chronic infection. Why not with complex equipment? I know that ozone can be used in air and water filtration systems in hospitals to prevent the transmission of nosocomial infections.
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