Hospital staff hands out hepatitis C to patients
When one enters the hospital you expect to be safe. The instruments that are used on you are expected to be sterilized and needles are to be immediately thrown out. Unfortunately, that is not what has been happening for the last thirty years and the medical community is not planning on fixing the problem any time soon. That problem is that techs, nurses, and doctors are stealing medication, pain killers in particular and giving saline instead to patients. Now that in itself would be a capital crime, patients in extreme pain never getting their pain killers because the medical staff is stoned on them. Unfortunately that is not the end of the problem, many of these IV drug users have hepatitis C because they are sharing needles with others because they use illegal drugs as well. To make sure that they are not caught using drugs in the hospital, they inject the patient saline from their own needle that was used by themselves. The blood left in the needle is injected into the patient and now they have hepatitis. (Source: MSNBC)
The medical community allows people with hepatitis C to work in hospital settings. The patients are never informed and as such are left open to be infected by anyone on staff that has this disease. There is a case in Denver right now where a hospital tech may have infected 6000 people with her hepatitis C. Now we have a situation where an IV drug user at the hospital may have ruined the lives of all these people because she was stoned on hospital pain killers. Even if the courts throw away the key and she gets life imprisonment for her deeds, what does that do for all the victims? Laws must be put in place that forbid anyone with hepatitis to work in a hospital setting and that routine drug testing happens for all medical staff. Anyone that is found to be a user is immediately removed from the hospital until they have completed a full anti drug program. Plus, better verification of powerful drugs so that managers and DEA know how the drug is administered and who had access to it. Perhaps any injectable pain killer must be administered by two people, the second being the charge nurse or other manager. At that time a drop can be tested to show that the needle indeed has the prescribed medicine before it is administered.
There are many types of technology that can be employed to try and stop this problem, but the real way is to make sure those working on you in the hospital are playing by the rules, are not stoned on drugs, and are not harboring dangerous diseases. Think about this the next time you are in the hospital and a nurse is giving you an injection. While congress works on a new bill to overhaul our medical system, something to protect the patients against this type of danger should be done now.
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