infection

Unsafe Injection Practices Plaque U.S. Outpatient Facilities

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In a post last year I discussed how an Oral Surgeon Investigated for Reusing Needles and Syringes. In a recent article in JAMA titled “Unsafe Injection Practices Plague US Outpatient Facilities, Harm Patients,” Bridget M. Kuehn discusses many problems with injection practices (December 26, 2012,Vol 308, No. 24, pp. 2551-2552). She describes how hepatitis C virus was contracted by 2 patients who received an epidural injection from a pain management clinic. “During the visit, they observed the physician who treated both patients withdrawing medication from a multiple-dose vial with a previously used syringe topped with a new needle, a breach of safe injection practices that may have contaminated the vial and exposed subsequent patients to potential blood-borne infections.” This led to 8,000 patients who were treated at the clinic to be tested and 8 additional cases of hepatis C to … Read more

Deadly Infection and Wisdom Teeth Removal

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I found a short snippet from the Wharton School of Business. The article addresses Wharton’s 2010 Business Plan Competition. One of the teams in the article is called R2R Therapeutics. The motivation for the team was 2nd year Wharton MBA student Bee Rhee who almost lost his wife due to a bacterial infection that occurred after the removal of his wife’s wisdom teeth. His wife was given antibiotics and they were able to stop the infection and she is currently alive today. However this business plan from this team does highlight a growing concern in healthcare which has to do with bacterial which is becoming more and more resistant to antibiotics. R2R Therapeutics’ goal is to combat these drug resistant bacteria by focusing on a novel cationic steroid antibiotic called R2R-1 which will work to disrupt the cell membrane and … Read more