657 Patients May Be Exposed to Hepatitis B, C

It sickens me to find out about this, but the New York State Department of Health announced on Monday (9/15) that a Manhattan dialysis clinic was closed down after an investigation found evidence of "unacceptable infection control practices." What the state department of public health calls "unacceptable", I call completely dangerous: blood on the treatment chairs and dialysis machines, inadequate disinfection of equipment, and poor hand washing from the staff.

As many of you may know, dialysis patients have to get their blood filtered, usually three times a week, using a dialysis machine (think mechanical kidney). These patients are often at increased risk of infection which certainly isn't helped by medical professionals not doing their jobs.

Of course hepatitis C is just one of the diseases these people could have been exposed to. Three other potentially life-threatening blood-borne diseases are hepatitis B, hepatitis D and HIV. Doctors, nurses and technicians are trained to protect themselves and patients from the diseases transmitted by blood. Folks, it's pretty basic stuff: wash your hands. Use sterile equipment. Clean up spilled blood and disinfect using a bleach solution. If the people we entrust for our healthcare can't guarantee this level of protection, then even with all our fancy equipment and technology, we're really not much advanced past the middle ages in terms of working with microbes.

In my opinion, praise is in order for the New York State Department of Public Health for shutting this place down and for publicizing what happened. Now these 657 patients (or anyone who was a patient there anytime after January 23, 2004) can seek proper treatment and start monitoring their health for signs and symptoms of viral hepatitis and other blood-borne disease.