What Good are the FDA and CDC when they Consistently Fail to Perform the Tasks for Which They Were Created?

Much like Obamacare, Government health agencies are not much interested in our health. Politics over People, No Lives (of those little people) Matter at the CDC and FDA. m/r

Feds Fiddle While Superbugs Spread | The American Spectator

By Betsy McCaughey – 2.24.15

You’d think the VA is now running the FDA and the CDC.

Seven patients at UCLA Ronald Reagan medical center contracted a deadly superbug from an utterly routine medical procedure. Two have died. A third, an eighteen-year-old boy, fights on for his life after 83 days in the hospital, mostly in intensive care. All this suffering was preventable. If the CDC and the FDA had alerted UCLA and other hospitals about medical equipment they knew was contaminated, patients would not have been put at risk. The agencies had already watched the same lethal problem unfold in Chicago, Seattle, and elsewhere but they swept it under the rug.

Imagine having a long flexible tube with a camera on the end threaded down your throat to treat gallstones, ulcers, and the like, something half a million patients undergo every year. You assume it’s clean. But these reusable devices — a special type of endoscope — have a design flaw that prevents thorough cleaning. The result is that germs lurk inside the device. That’s what happened in L.A., where as many as 179 patients were exposed to a particularly deadly germ called Carbapenem — resistant bacteria. The CDC nicknamed it “nightmare bacteria” because few if any antibiotics work against it, and close to half the patients who get it die.

UCLA didn’t start using the defectively designed scopes until June 2014. That’s six months after the CDC knew that 91 patients in a suburban Chicago hospital had fallen victim to the same problem. The CDC responded to the Chicago outbreak with secrecy and inaction, doing nothing more than issuing a report in January 2014 that conspicuously omitted the model number or manufacturer of the scope. At the time, I called the CDC to press them, and was told it was the Pentax 3490 TX, information doctors and hospitals everywhere should have had. The report also referred to “hospital A” instead of naming the Chicago-area hospital, and never mentioned that some infected patients died.

What did the CDC recommend in response to the Chicago outbreak? It lamely suggested that any other hospital experiencing an outbreak “should consider the possibility of endoscopic transmission.” That’s not prevention, just after-the-fact explanation. So hospitals are supposed to wait until after patients get sick and thenlook at their medical devices? That’s crazy.

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