A story on CBS News says the current meningitis outbreak presents a unique challenge for medical professionals dealing with it. That’s because the fungus causing it has never before been associated with meningitis.
The report quotes Dr. Arjun Srinivasan of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as saying: “I don’t think there is a precedent for this kind of thing … This is definitely new territory ...
continue reading...The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has released a list of customers of a pharmacy linked with a deadly meningitis outbreak.
According to a story on Patch.com, the list does not include the specific products that the customers received from the New England Compounding Center in Framingham, Mass. The meningitis outbreak is linked to a batch of injectable steroid medication commonly used to treat steroids, which was ...
continue reading...A Massachusetts Department of Public Health inspection report found dirty conditions likely to cause contamination at a pharmacy linked to a deadly meningitis outbreak, ABC News reports.
Inspectors found dirty floors and a leaky boiler at the New England Compounding Center. Although they have yet to determine how exactly the fungal contaminant got into vials of a steroid medication called methylprednisolone acetate, inspectors noted in their report that the conditions created an “environment susceptible to contaminant growth.”
Inspectors also reported improper use ...
continue reading...An outside firm that the state of Massachusetts hired to do an assessment found problems at a pharmacy linked to a deadly meningitis outbreak, CBS reports.
According to Massachusetts state documents from 2006, investigators found inadequate contamination control and no written standard operating procedures for using equipment, among other problems, at the New England Compounding Center. The NECC corrected the problems that year, and a state inspection in 2011 found no ...
continue reading...A story in USA Today concerns a physician who claims that a current deadly outbreak of fungal meningitis is nearly identical to one that occurred a decade ago. If the federal government had enacted some safety measures then, the current outbreak might have been avoided, according to John Perfect, chief of infectious disease at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C.
According to the article, Perfect treated five patients sickened in North Carolina a decade ago, one of whom died.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has confirmed that steroid medication linked to a deadly meningitis outbreak is contaminated with a fungus.
A Reuters report says the FDA made that confirmation on one of three lots of the medication, and is still testing the other two. The agency is also testing other injectable medications produced by the New England Compounding Center, the Massachusetts-based specialty pharmacy that produced the infected steroid.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control says the ...
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