Washington Injury Law Blog

MRSA – or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus – a germ that spreads by contact is a potentially deadly staph infection that is all too common in hospitals in Washington and across the United States. The scary part is that it can be on your skin right now. Many people are carriers of MRSA and are unaffected by it until they suffer a open wound injury.

The good news is that there is a simple test that hospitals can run to find MRSA before treating a patient and protocols for isolating outbreaks. The bad news is that hospitals have refused to put the test into routine use. Before you receive any treatment involving an open wound at a hospital, especially surgery, I would insist on a MRSA test being run on you skin. That way you will know you aren’t carrying the deadly germ and infect yourself. You will also know that if you get MRSA it was most likely from the hospital.

MRSA has been around for 40 years. But recently the outbreaks of it have escalated to an alarming level. 6 out of 7 people get MRSA from a health care facility. In 2007 the CDC issued a press release stating that MRSA was now killing more people than AIDS. The CDC estimated that in 19,000 people died from MRSA. Scary stuff!

Luckily, the Washington State Department of health just issued a new rule requiring all hospitals to report all patient cases linked to the deadly germ MRSA. Be careful at Harborview Medical Center, it is one of the local hospitals that has had a fairly significant problem with MRSA and currently lacks what I consider adequate safeguards against its spread.

Max Meyers, Esq.

Sources:

How our hospitals unleashed a MRSA epidemic

MRSA’s toll climbs, but hospital is slow to change

State to begin tracking hospital cases tied to deadly germ MRSA

A story by the AP reports that Government safety advocates have announced a recall of about 320,000 Jardine cribs, after four children became trapped. The wooden slats and spindles on the crib’s frames can break. Children can get trapped in the remaining gap. The Consumer Product Safety Commission is aware of at least 42 incidents of broken slats and spindles, and four instances of children getting trapped. Two children suffered minor injuries. 

The recalled cribs were manufactured in Taiwan by Jardine Enterprises and sold by KidsWorld stores, Geoffrey stores, Toys “R” Us and Babies “R” Us. They were available nationwide between January 2002 and May 2008.

Finding AP news story here.

I came across an interesting blog post by the Maryland Injury Lawyer Blog regardng a recent article in The New York Times aptly titled, “It Must Be Bob. I Hear His Hip Squeaking.” The article discussed people with hip implants, mainly Stryker hip implants, who were told to try new ceramic hip implants but have now developed squeaky hip joints. The Stryker hip implants and their sister implants were promoted as being much more durable than the previous generation of hip implants. But patients hips soon began to squeak, raising concerns that the noises were not just embarrassing and uncomfortable, but foreboding of more serious problems with their hip implants.

One patient has posted a video showing the problem: [youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=qWerMkRAAWg[/youtube]

Prior generations of hip implants, before 2003, had little problems with squeaking. The Times cited a Journal of Arthroplasty which found that 10 patients out of 143 who received ceramic hips from 2003 to 2005, or 7 percent, developed squeaking. Meanwhile, no squeaks occurred among a control group of 48 patients who received hips made of metal and plastic.

Last fall the FDA warned Stryker that it failed to take the steps needed to prevent squeaking and other problems. Many patients have had surgery to replace the squeaky hip implants. Many have hired lawyers to sue Stryker, arguing that these hips never should have been put on the market without proper testing because, as it often happens, Stryker rushed its ceramic-on-ceramic titanium hip replacement onto the market to create a competitive advantage with its competitors.

No one knows what the long term consequences of these problems are. “Catastrophic failure has been a concern in the past, with older ceramic components,” said Dr. James M. Bried, a California surgeon who fears that squeaking might be a harbinger of future difficulties.

From 2004 through 2006, medical errors resulted in 238,337 potentially preventable deaths of Medicare patients – according to the fifth annual Patient Safety in American Hospitals Study. This cost the U.S. Medicare program $8.8 billion dollars.

The study showed that patients treated at top-performing hospitals were, on average, 43 percent less likely to experience one or more medical errors than patients at the poorest-performing hospitals. This really emphasizes the importance of checking out the hospital and doctor before you have any major surgery performed.

Among the other findings:

 • Patients had a 20 percent chance of dying as a result of suffering a medical error.
 • The overall death rate among patients who experienced medical error(s) fell by almost 5 percent between 2004 and 2006.
 • However, over that time, there were increases in post-operative respiratory failure, post-operative pulmonary embolism or deep vein thrombosis, post-operative sepsis (blood infection), and post-operative abdominal wound separation/splitting.
 • The most common types of medical errors were bed sores, failure to rescue, and post-operative respiratory failure – which together accounted for 63.4% of the medical errors.
 • Failure to rescue improved 11.1 percent from 2004 to 2006, while both bed sores and post-operative respiratory failure worsened during that time.
 • If all hospitals performed at the level of the top-ranked hospitals, about 37,214 patient deaths could have been avoided.

Starting Oct. 1, the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will stop reimbursing hospitals for the treatment of eight major preventable errors, including objects left in the body after surgery and certain kinds of post-surgical infections.

As a Kirkland Washington Medical Malpractice attorney I have seen the devastation medical malpractice can cause in clients’ lives. I am truly hopeful that when the government and insurance companies stop paying for medical errors we will see dramatic improvement in patient safety in our hospitals and less medical malpractice by our doctors.

Source: HealthDay News post on msn.com

Common sense has finally taken hold with a realistic solution to stopping the 98,000 deaths that result from medical errors each year. The Dennis Quaid story on 60 Minutes has thrust the medical error problem in this country into the media spot light. I was watching the CBS evening news Monday night and saw a report that the federal government – specifically Medicare – and several insurance companies have pledged to stop paying for the bills associated with medical care given to fix certain preventable medical mistakes. My wife Shelly’s reaction to this was – Duh! Why have they paid in the past?

Beginning in October 2008 Medicare will no longer pay for eight hospital mistakes – including:

• Urinary infection from catheter
• Bed sores
• Surgical object left in body
• Air embolism
• Giving wrong type of blood
• Blood infection from catheter
• Chest infection after bypass surgery
• Hospital – caused injury

Medicare believes that if they stop paying for mistakes then hospitals will stop making them. Sure makes good sense to me.

The State of Pennsylvania’s Medicare system is already refusing to pay for 27 “never events” including surgery on the wrong body part and medication leading to injury or death. Hospitals and doctors should pay for fixing their mistakes not the patients. In the past 2 years as a result not paying for mistakes Pennsylvania hospitals are seeing fewer mistakes and fewer deaths. Pennsylvania hospitals and doctors have put better safety measures in place – like 40 question pre-surgery checklists – to help prevent medical errors from happening in the first place. The quickest way to enact change is to make it unprofitable – you gotta love capitalism!

Washington should follow Pennsylvania’s lead and make sure all insurance companies stop paying for preventable medical errors.

Source: CBS Evening News – March 17, 2008

60 Minutes aired a story about how Dennis Quaid’s newborn twin daughters were nearly killed after being given 1,000 times more blood thinning medicine than they should have.  Nurses gave Mr. Quaid’s daughters the adult version of a blood thinning medicine by mistake. The exact same medical error had killed 3 infants in the Midwest a year prior. Why does this potentially fatal medical error keep happening? 

100,000 people die each year as result of medical errors. That is more than breast cancer or car accidents cause each year. It’s the health care industries dirty little secret. Hospitals and doctors hide behind secret review meetings where the error is discussed but rarely – if ever – freely disclosed to the public. The public is kept in the dark in favor of profits over safety.

Drug companies and health care facilities need to work together to find better ways to guard against mixing up children’s medicines with adult. Better color coding of the labels could have prevented the 3 deaths and Quaid daughters ordeal. The drug maker eventually did this but the Quaid’s got caught before their hospital had used up the old medicine and brought in new with the better labeling.

We as citizens can help by demanding that our politicians make stopping repeated and preventable medical errors a priority and require better safe guards on drug distribution in health care facilities. So fatal medical errors do not keep happening over and over.

Doctors are now linking serious health problems and diseases to E. coli and other food-borne illnesses thought to have been recovered from years or decades earlier. The Seattle PI reports that scientists “described high blood pressure, kidney damage, even full kidney failure striking 10 to 20 years later in people who survived severe E. coli infection as children, arthritis after a bout of salmonella or shigella, and a mysterious paralysis that can attack people who just had mild symptoms of campylobacter.” ”‘Folks often assume once you’re over the acute illness, that’s it, you’re back to normal and that’s the end of it,’ said Dr. Robert Tauxe of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”

The long-term effects have yet to be studied in full so its unclear how many people are at risk. It’s also unclear what other illnesses may be linked to food poisoning. However, the lasting effects of food poisoning appear to have been totally underestimated. Just ask Seattle resident Alyssa Chrobuck who suffered E. coli poisoning as a 5 year-old in the Jack In the Box outbreak 15 years ago.

Alyssa was hospitalized with serious complications from the E.coli infection. Alyssa is now a 20 year-old college student who suffers from high blood pressure, hospitalizations for colon inflammation, a hiatal hernia, thyroid removal, and endometriosis. All of which is very uncommon for a 20 year-old young woman. She is convince if not for the E. coli infection her health would be much better.

According to the Centers for Disease Control food-borne illnesses cause 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths a year. Among survivors, some long-term consequences are obvious from the outset. Some required kidney transplants and may have scarred intestines that cause lasting digestive difficulty. According University of Utah’s Dr. Andrew Pavia, the university’s pediatric infectious diseases chief, E. coli doesn’t seem to trigger long-term problems unless it started shutting down the kidneys when first infected. Future studies may show otherwise, but for now it appears only about 10% of E. coli sufferers develop kidney problems when first infected, therefore only 10% may develop these additional health problems later in life.

Regardless still pretty scary stuff!

If you have suffered a spinal cord injury in a Washington car accident there are many side effects that you have to deal with regularly.  Atlanta attorney Ken Shigley of the Atlanta Injury Law & Civil Litigation Blog has posted another good article regarding spinal cord injury effects.  Mr. Shigley’s post offers some helpful information regarding muscle spasticity with tips on what causes it, what it may mean, and what to watch out for if you have a spinal cord injury and are having muscle spasms.  Here is the link to Mr. Shigley’s article: http://www.atlantainjurylawblog.com/spinal-cord-injury-spinal-cord-injuries-and-muscle-spasticity.html

If you have suffered a spinal cord injury in a Washington car accident I do not have to tell you the difficulties in daily living that you must over come. I’m always on the look out for information that will be helpful to you. Atlanta attorney Ken Shigley of the Atlanta Injury Law & Civil Litigation Blog posted a very good article with some helpful information regarding autonomic dysreflexia, which is a problem commonly suffered by spinal cord injury victims.  Here is the link to Mr. Shigley’s article: http://www.atlantainjurylawblog.com/spinal-cord-injury-spinal-cord-injury-jury-trials-require-explanation-of-autonomic-dysreflexia.html.

An expert panel in Washington has delivered its report that was ordered by Gov. Gregoire. The report was to address better ways to monitor and prevent the dangerous antibiotic resistant MRSA infection.

Gov. Gregoire in November told the state Health Department increase its efforts to track cases of MRSA and better educate the public about ways to prevent the infection. One recommendation in the report is that hospitals conduct infection surveillance to prevent the spread of MRSA infections. Another recommendation is that hospitals monitor the community for MRSA and report all cases to the Washington State Health department. Reporting is not required by the state at this time.

The report contained recommendations for out patient care as well. Among the recommendations where better public education on wound care and infection prevention; adopting guidelines intended to prevent drug resistant organisms; and promoting cautious use of antibiotics.

New threats to our health keep appearing that cannot be treated by the drugs we currently have available. I wonder when the drug companies will make it a real priority to develop new antibiotics to fight these ever increasing dangers?