Government Poisoned Citizens During Prohibition?
February 26, 2010
Slate
By Deborah Blum
It was Christmas Eve 1926, the streets aglitter with snow and lights, when the man afraid of Santa Claus stumbled into the emergency room at New York City’s Bellevue Hospital. He was flushed, gasping with fear: Santa Claus, he kept telling the nurses, was just behind him, wielding a baseball bat.
Before hospital staff realized how sick he was—the alcohol-induced hallucination was just a symptom—the man died. So did another holiday partygoer. And another. As dusk fell on Christmas, the hospital staff tallied up more than 60 people made desperately ill by alcohol and eight dead from it. Within the next two days, yet another 23 people died in the city from celebrating the season.
Doctors were accustomed to alcohol poisoning by then, the routine of life in the Prohibition era. The bootlegged whiskies and so-called gins often made people sick. The liquor produced in hidden stills frequently came tainted with metals and other impurities. But this outbreak was bizarrely different. The deaths, as investigators would shortly realize, came courtesy of the U.S. government.
Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.
Although mostly forgotten today, the “chemist’s war of Prohibition” remains one of the strangest and most deadly decisions in American law-enforcement history. As one of its most outspoken opponents, Charles Norris, the chief medical examiner of New York City during the 1920s, liked to say, it was “our national experiment in extermination.” Poisonous alcohol still kills—16 people died just this month after drinking lethal booze in Indonesia, where bootleggers make their own brews to avoid steep taxes—but that’s due to unscrupulous businessmen rather than government order.
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Scandal Over Death at Hospital – None Blamed
February 26, 2010
Mail Online
By Fay Schlesinger, Andy Dolan, and Tim Shipman
Not a single official has been disciplined over the worst-ever NHS hospital scandal, it emerged last night.
Up to 1,200 people lost their lives needlessly because Mid-Staffordshire NHS Trust put government targets and cost-cutting ahead of patient care.
But none of the doctors, nurses and managers who failed them has suffered any formal sanction.
Indeed, some have either retired on lucrative pensions or have swiftly found new jobs.
Former chief executive Martin Yeates, who has since left with a £1million pension pot, six months’ salary and a reported £400,000 payoff, did not even give evidence to the inquiry which detailed the scale of the scandal yesterday.
He was said to be medically unfit to do so, though he sent some information to chairman Robert Francis through his solicitor.
The devastating-report into the Stafford Hospital-shambles’ laid waste to Labour’s decade-long obsession with box-ticking and league tables.
The independent inquiry headed by Robert Francis QC found the safety of sick and dying patients was ‘routinely neglected’. Others were subjected to ‘ inhumane treatment’, ‘bullying’, ‘abuse’ and ‘rudeness’.
The shocking estimated death toll, three times the previous figure of 400, has prompted calls for a full public inquiry.
Bosses at the Trust – officially an ‘elite’ NHS institution – were condemned for their fixation with cutting waiting times to hit Labour targets and leaving neglected patients to die.
But after a probe that was controversially held in secret, not a single individual has been publicly blamed.
The inquiry found that:
• Patients were left unwashed in their own filth for up to a month as nurses ignored their requests to use the toilet or change their sheets;
• Four members of one family. including a new-born baby girl. died within 18 months after of blunders at the hospital;
• Medics discharged patients hastily out of fear they risked being sacked for delaying;
• Wards were left filthy with blood, discarded needles and used dressings while bullying managers made whistleblowers too frightened to come forward.
Last night the General Medical Council announced it was investigating several doctors. The Nursing and Midwifery Council is investigating at least one nurse and is considering other cases.
Ministers suggested the report highlighted a dreadful ‘local’ scandal, but its overall conclusions are a blistering condemnation of Labour’s approach to the NHS.
It found that hospital were so preoccupied with saving money and pursuit of elite foundation trust status that they ‘lost sight of its fundamental responsibility to provide safe care’.
Health Secretary Andy Burnham accepted 18 recommendations from Mr Francis and immediately announced plans for a new inquiry, to be held in public, into how Department of Health and NHS regulators failed to spot the disaster.
But Julie Bailey, head of the campaign group Cure the NHS, condemned his response as ‘outrageous’ and backed Tory and Liberal Democrat demands for a full public inquiry into what went wrong.
Tory leader David Cameron said: ‘We need openness, clarity and transparency to stop this happening again.’ Gordon Brown described the scandal as a ‘completely unacceptable management failure’ and revealed that the cases of 300 patients are now under investigation.
He told MPs the Government was belatedly working on plans to ’strike off’ hospital managers responsible for failures. The hospital could also lose its cherished foundation status.
Shadow Health Secretary Andrew Lansley said ‘These awful events show how badly Labour has let down NHS patients. It should never again be possible for managers to put a tick in a box marked “target met” while patients are pushed off to a ward and left to die.’
The Francis probe was launched following a Healthcare Commission report on Stafford Hospital in March last year. It found that deaths at the hospital were 27 to 45 per cent higher than normal, meaning some 400 to 1,200 people died unnecessarily between 2005 and 2008.
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Nurse on Trial for Reporting Doctor
February 9, 2010
New York Times
By Kevin Sack
It occurred to Anne Mitchell as she was writing the letter that she might lose her job, which is why she chose not to sign it. But it was beyond her conception that she would be indicted and threatened with 10 years in prison for doing what she knew a nurse must: inform state regulators that a doctor at her rural hospital was practicing bad medicine.
When she was fingerprinted and photographed at the jail here last June, it felt as if she had entered a parallel universe, albeit one situated in this barren scrap of West Texas oil patch.
“It was surreal,” said Mrs. Mitchell, 52, the wife of an oil field mechanic and mother of a teenage son. “I said how can this be? You can’t go to prison for doing the right thing.”
But in what may be an unprecedented prosecution, Mrs. Mitchell is scheduled to stand trial in state court on Monday for “misuse of official information,” a third-degree felony in Texas.
The prosecutor said he would show that Mrs. Mitchell had a history of making “inflammatory” statements about Dr. Rolando G. Arafiles Jr. and intended to damage his reputation when she reported him last April to the Texas Medical Board, which licenses and disciplines doctors.
Mrs. Mitchell counters that as an administrative nurse, she had a professional obligation to protect patients from what she saw as a pattern of improper prescribing and surgical procedures — including a failed skin graft that Dr. Arafiles performed in the emergency room, without surgical privileges. He also sutured a rubber tip to a patient’s crushed finger for protection, an unconventional remedy that was later flagged as inappropriate by the Texas Department of State Health Services.
Charges against a second nurse, Vickilyn Galle, who helped Mrs. Mitchell write the letter, were dismissed at the prosecutor’s discretion last week.
The case has been infused with the small-town politics of this wind-whipped city of 5,200 in the heart of the Permian Basin, 10 miles from the New Mexico border. The seeming conflicts of interest are as abundant as the cattle grazing among the pump jacks and mesquite.
When the medical board notified Dr. Arafiles of the anonymous complaint, he protested to his friend, the Winkler County sheriff, that he was being harassed. The sheriff, an admiring patient who credits the doctor with saving him after a heart attack, obtained a search warrant to seize the two nurses’ work computers and found the letter.
Both sides acknowledge that the case has polarized the community, and the judge has moved the trial to a neighboring county.
The state and national nurses associations have called the prosecution an outrage and raised $40,000 for the defense. Legal experts argue that in a civil context, Mrs. Mitchell would seem to be protected by Texas whistle-blower laws.
“To me, this is completely over the top,” said Louis A. Clark, president of the Government Accountability Project, a group that promotes the defense of whistle-blowers. “It seems really, really unique.”
Until they were fired without explanation on June 1, Mrs. Mitchell and Mrs. Galle had worked a combined 47 years at Winkler County Memorial Hospital here, most recently as its compliance and quality improvement officers.
The nurses, who are highly regarded even by the administrator who dismissed them, said the case had stained their reputations and drained their savings. With felony charges pending, neither has been able to find work. They said they could feel heads turn when they walked into local lunch spots like El Joey’s Mexican restaurant.
“It has derailed our careers, and we’re probably not going to be able to get them back on track again,” said Mrs. Galle, 54, a grandmother who is depicted around town as the soft-spoken Thelma to Mrs. Mitchell’s straight-shooting Louise. “We’re just in disbelief that you could be arrested for doing something you had been told your whole career was an obligation.”
It was not long after the public hospital hired Dr. Arafiles in 2008 that the nurses said they began to worry. They sounded internal alarms but felt they were not being heeded by administrators.
Frustrated and fearing for patients, they directed the medical board to six cases “of concern” that were identified by file numbers but not by patient names. The letter also mentioned that Dr. Arafiles was sending e-mail messages to patients about an herbal supplement he sold on the side.
Mrs. Mitchell typed the letter and mailed it with a separate complaint signed by a third nurse, who wrote that she had resigned because of similar concerns about Dr. Arafiles. That nurse was not charged.
To convict Mrs. Mitchell, the prosecution must prove that she used her position to disseminate confidential information for a “nongovernmental purpose” with intent to harm Dr. Arafiles.
Mari E. Robinson, executive director of the Texas Medical Board, has warned in a blistering letter to prosecutors that the case will have “a significant chilling effect” on the reporting of malpractice.
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School Staffers Received Insulin Instead of Swine Flu Vaccine
January 22, 2010
ABC News
By Joseph Brownstein
When staff members at a Wellesley, Mass., school went to the nurse last Friday, they expected to be injected with a vaccine for theH1N1 flu. What they received instead was a shot of insulin resulting in a bout with low blood sugar.
While the staffers seem to be suffering no long-term damage from mistakenly receiving the insulin injections, investigations are ongoing to determine what caused the medical error. Indications thus far have been that a school nurse was responsible. The nurse has been temporarily relieved of duty.
While ABC News contacted people at the departments of health for the town of Wellesley and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the Wellesley School District, it remains unclear how the flu vaccine, which can be distributed in pre-filled syringes or vials, was mistaken for insulin, which is drawn from a vial because each dose needs to be calibrated when it is given.
Such errors have happened before. This past fall, a number of people in the neighboring town of Needham received a seasonal flu vaccine in place of the H1N1 vaccines they were supposed to receive. And in 2007, a teacher in the nearby town of Attleboro also received an injection of insulin instead of the intended flu shot.
“Mistakes can always be made,” said Lisa Lowery, a registered nurse and immunizations program manager for the Visiting Nurse Service in Indianapolis. While she is reluctant to blame the nurse, she said other steps can be taken to avoid such a problem.
The benefit of having a nurse specifically performing a vaccination clinic, according to Lowery, is that it allows the nurse to be more focused. “You’re in a habit of doing what you’re doing. You’re doing one vaccine and only one vaccine,” she said.
“In practices, you’re taught to take the bottle to another nurse and have her double-check what you’re about to give,” she said — a situation that isn’t possible when a school nurse alone is administering vaccine.
“That nurse is not used to injecting vaccines as a school nurse,” said Lowery. “It would have been her habit to pick up insulin. Having someone to back them up and check them out would have prevented some more errors. If you’re holding a vaccination clinic, use someone who’s used to doing that.”
Kay Renny, a registered nurse and manager of community programs for the Visiting Nurse Association of Southeast Michigan in Detroit said other steps are typically taken to avoid such a problem.
She said when her nurses are giving out both seasonal and swine flu vaccines, they do so in two separate lines with two separate forms, which do not look alike, so that nurses — who are only administering one shot — will notice. “This is the first year where we’re administering two flu vaccines at the same time,” she said, explaining it presented a new challenge.
When a mistake happens, “It doesn’t hurt them, but it doesn’t help them. What they want is what they’re there for,” said Renny. “You try to put steps in place to avoid that happening.”
She noted that the vials for insulin and flu vaccine are similar but the syringes are different, with those for insulin being smaller. “Whenever administering any kind of medication, you have to double check when you have multiple kinds of medication in front of you. You really need to double check your double check.”
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Doctors Misdiagnose Woman With HIV, Herpes and Hepatitis
December 22, 2009
By Stefanie Cohen and Isabel Vincent
A city hospital nearly destroyed a New Jersey woman’s life and wrecked her marriage after misdiagnosing her with terminal HIV, hepatitis and herpes, according to a bombshell lawsuit.
Maria Osorio, 54, of Passaic, said she saw an ad on TV offering a $15 mammogram at Harlem Hospital over Valentine’s Day last February and decided to take advantage of the screening.
When a nurse offered her a free instant cheek swab and blood test, too, she accepted. That’s when she was told she had HIV.
“It was horrible. I wanted to throw myself on the subway tracks,” she said.
The shocked Osorio immediately turned on her husband of 37 years, Gabriel Lezcano, 60, who works as a janitor in New Jersey.
“I started screaming violently at him. I pushed him. I pulled his hair. ‘Who were you with?’ I asked him. He kept denying that he was with anyone, but I kept raising my voice and pushing him. ‘You must have been with someone. You must have had too many beers and maybe now you just don’t remember,’ ” she recalled.
Lezcano fought back. “I’ve been a good man to you. I haven’t been with anyone else. I am a very scrupulous man. I just do my work and I come home,” he told his furious wife.
Lezcano told The Post that the accusations of his wife, a fellow Colombian immigrant, nearly killed him.
“She’s my only woman,” he said. “I felt that someone was trying to trick us.”
His denials fell on deaf ears. The distraught Osorio was convinced her husband was lying. How else could she have contracted the sexually transmitted disease?
A few days later, the hospital called again to say the disease was very advanced, according to court papers.
“I wanted to kill him,” she said. “I began to mistrust him and hate him. I couldn’t believe that he had been with other women, that he had lied to me.”
She also decided to commit suicide.
“I kept thinking how I could kill myself. All I did was plan how I was going to end my life,” she said. “I resolved to do it at the beach in the summer, just to throw myself in the ocean and make it look like an accident.”
She stopped sleeping. She threw up constantly. She couldn’t work.
“I didn’t want to get out of bed,” she said.
Her husband stopped sleeping, too. They both became addicted to sleeping pills and took to sleeping in separate beds, alone in their misery and distrust.
Her two grown sons, who still live in Colombia, were hysterical. They would call, crying, insisting there was a mistake.
When Osorio, a home health aide, pointed out to the nurses that she had no medical problems whatsoever, they replied, “This is a silent disease.”
“They told me that this machine does not lie,” she said.
But almost three weeks later, the hospital called to say she was perfectly healthy.
Yet no one apologized or admitted to a mistake, she said. One secretary said she was sorry for her pain.
When she went to the hospital to talk to the nurses who had originally tested her, they hugged her and told her that “the hand of God had come down to bless me because the machine never lies,” she said.
She was stunned by the reversal of fortune.
“I was in a dream. I kept saying, ‘Thanks to God, thanks to God,’ and I hugged my husband, and we prayed to the saints on the altar on our kitchen table.”
But the damage to the marriage had already been done.
“I met him when I was 17 years old. We were always very united as a couple,” Osorio said. “We work and we come home, and that is our life.”
Now they still sleep in separate beds, and still rely on pills to sleep.
“This has really hurt our marriage. We are afraid to have any sexual contact with each other. We are still very nervous,” Osorio said.
Her husband agreed.
“My partner has been destroyed emotionally,” he said.
Osorio filed a medical-malpractice notice of claim against the city in state Supreme Court in Manhattan last week.
“I can’t believe there could be such errors,” Lezcano said. “We don’t want anyone else to go through what we’ve been through.”
City officials said they would not comment on pending litigation.
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Vaccines Tested on Homeless
November 20, 2009
Natural News
By David Gutierrez
Three doctors and six nurses from the town of Grudziadz, Poland, are being investigated on charges that they recruited 350 homeless people into a clinical trial of a vaccine for the H5N1 flu virus without informing them what the study was really about.
Twenty-one people died during the course of the study, significantly higher than the average influenza death rate, which would have led to eight deaths.
“It is in the interests of all doctors that those who are responsible for this are punished,” said Poland’s health minister, Ewa Kopacz. She said that while no direct link has been proven between the experimental vaccine and the deaths, she does not believe that any of the health care workers implicated should be allowed to practice medicine further.
Prosecutors claim that the participants – from a homeless shelter – were recruited into the study by being offered £1-£2 ($1.65-$3.00) to undergo a test of a new vaccine for standard, seasonal influenza. Instead, however, the study was meant to test a vaccine of the far more lethal H5N1 virus, which has a death rate of more than 50 percent.
Novartis Vaccines, the pharmaceutical company involved in the trial, claims that it was deceived about the consent procedures that the researchers intended to use.
The scandal is only the latest to hit Poland’s health care sector. In 2002, several ambulance medics were convicted of murdering patients in order to gain kickbacks from funeral homes.
Poland is a global center for health care research, due to a well-trained medical staff, large population and good infrastructure. It also tends to be easy to find patients willing to undergo experimental therapies, as the public health care system tends to pay only for the cheapest, most well-proven generic treatments.
Monika Stefanczyk, a senior pharmaceutical market analyst at the consulting firm PMR, predicted that unless some of these factors change, Poland’s medical research industry will remain largely unaffected by the scandal.
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