Hospital officials in Pennsylvania has cautioned over 1,300 patients who underwent an open-heart operation there within the past four years that they may be in danger for due to bacterial infection. These infections may have caused the fatalities of four patients.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has associated the infections to heater-cooler apparatus that was used during the operations. In a statement released by WellSpan York Hospital, in York, Pennsylvania, they have warned nearly1,300 open heart surgery patients by letter of possible exposure to a non-tuberculous mycobacterium, or NTM. Patients in danger were the ones who underwent open-heart surgery operation performed between Oct. 1, 2011 and July 24, 2015.
According to WellSpan York Hospital, the infection has been recognized in less than 1 percent of patients who had been through an open-heart operation during the duration of the concern.
In their press statement, Keith Noll, senior vice president of WellSpan Health and president of WellSpan York Hospital said that they understand that the reports of this probable threat of infection may be alarming to our open-heart patients, and for that they were truly apologetic about any discomfort that it may bring for those patients and their families.
Meanwhile, hospital authorities said that patients who had underwent other, noninvasive heart procedures like pacemakers, defibrillators, stents and ablations, are not in danger. Doctors and hospital staff are also not at risk for infection.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration have each released safety measures alerting health care providers about the possible connection between NTM bacteria that can develop in heater-cooler apparatus and NTM infections in open-heart surgery patients.
Between January 2010 and August 2015, the FDA acquired 32 Medical Device Reports (MDRs) of patient infections linked to heater-cooler devices or bacterial heater-cooler device contagion.
According to Noll, WellSpan has already replaced the heater-cooler devices with modern apparatus late July 2015 and has precisely preserving the equipments according to the enhanced cleaning procedures.
