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“In a state where nursing homes are rarely sanctioned, federal regulators did not penalize one of Hawaii’s premium institutions for its failure to protect defenseless elderly women from a sexually abusive caregiver. They also didn’t sanction a nursing home even after a nurse’s failure to follow physician orders resulted in the puncturing of a man’s abdominal organ, requiring surgery. The nurse inserted a feeding tube larger than what the doctor ordered. Those were among the cases Honolulu Star-Advertiser reporter Rob Perez cited to illustrate that Hawaii nursing homes often go unpenalized even when deficient care leads to resident harm. Over the past six years, the state had the second-lowest sanction rate in the country.”
The story of tainted medical wipes and other disposable medical supplies in our hospitals first caught the media’s attention when a child from Houston, TX apparently died from the bacterium Bacillus cereus, a cousin to Bacillus antracis, or anthrax. However, with deeper investigations done, it turns out the FDA was aware that the plant, owned by Triad Group and sister company H&P Industries (one of the nation's largest disposable medical supplies facility) has had numerous sanitary and safety violations dating back almost a decade.
Here are links to coverage from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and MSNBC.com:
http://www.jsonline.com/watchdog/watchdogreports/124552053.html
Tim Darragh, of The Morning Call reports that in January of this year, a patient at Lehigh Valley Hospital was have thought to have extremely high blood sugar, when it fact it was 100 times lower than the targeted range. As a result, the patient was given over 10 hours of insulin drip before bedside nurses discovered the testing strips had malfunctioned.
The patient, who had undergone a kidney transplant and had complications including a urinary tract infection, swelling on the brain and respiratory failure, later on the morning of Jan. 3 was found in an "unresponsive coma" as a result of "prolonged hypoglycemia," or too little blood sugar. Those conditions presented "brain death criteria," the report says. The unnamed patient died Jan. 6, it says.
The Morning Call then broke the news that the patient was a nun who taught sixth grade at a small Lehigh Valley Catholic elementary school.
http://www.mcall.com/news/local/mc-allentown-hospital-nun-death-20110616,0,781958.story
And then they reported that the coroner had ruled the death accidental.
In this report by the Times-News of Twin Falls, Idaho, journalist Ben Botkin reveals alarming statistics when it comes to the care provided by nursing facilities. In "2010, more than 57 percent of Idaho nursing homes provided unnecessary drugs to patients, according to inspection reports filed by the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare." Inspection reports showed nurses gave patients the wrong medicine or medicines that were not prescribed to them. Another report reveals that facility workers failed to report a patient's illness for two days, which eventually led to her death.
KHOU-TV’s Mark Greenblatt finds so much radiation in the water of Central Texas cities, that even the pipes that carry it set off Geiger counters, and citizens are afraid to drink it. Greenblatt also uncovered a 10-year old state scientific report calling the water serious health risk”, but Texas officials all but ignored it. The story is another in the reporter’s 6 month investigation into the region’s water radiation problem.
In this investigation by the Duluth News Tribune, reporters Brandon Stahl and Mark Stodghill revealed that one of the "highest-paid physicians at St. Luke's," neurosurgeon Stefan Konasiewicz, had a lengthy track record of complaints and malpractice suits. Konasiewicz cut and failed to repair a young woman's aorta during a spinal surgery that resulted in her bleeding to death. The surgeon also mishandled the treatment of an infection that resulted from another spinal surgery. The infection killed the recently retired woman who had plans to travel with her husband. Despite having "nine malpractice suits and a sanction from the Minnesota Board of Medical Practice for “unethical and unprofessional conduct,"" Konasiewicz continued working for St. Luke's for nearly a decade.
John Fauber of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel/JS Online uncovers more unsettling truths about our nations tug-of-war with scientific evidence versus greed.
After PRI's Ike Sriskandarajah found lion meat on the shelf at his neighborhood butcher and followed the trail to a dark corner of the exotic meat trade. Follow his investigation from his local butcher shop, to the harsh realities of "exotic mean with transcripts and the use of Document Cloud. Find out how "no federal agency regulates raising or killing lions for food; that the exotic animal trade is murky and somewhat illegal; and how we can eat almost anything."
A Palm Beach Post investigation finds that kids who have been placed in state juvenile facilities have been receiving heavy doses of antipsychotic drugs, which are meant to have a tranquilizing effect on the brain. The pills were passed out to children in the facilities "for reasons that never were approved by federal regulators." The drugs can have harmful side effects in young people, including thoughts of suicide. The Department of Juvenile Justice does not keep track of the prescriptions written for the children, but in response to this article, has imposed a review of the use of the potentially harmful medications. The investigation also revealed that several top doctors who were prescribing the medication had also received "speaker fees or gifts" from the companies that manufactured the antipsychotic drugs.
After a large wave of deaths in 2006 due to overdosing on prescription pain medicine, the CDC authored a critical study linking deaths from those drugs to an increase of up to 500% in the number of prescriptions written. In that same medical journal, two researchers from the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health took exception with those conclusions and warned against increasing regulation of the drugs.
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