Monday, October 15, 2012

Everyone needs to keep looking. Two thousand people are a lot of people.

Not their fault, the media has been only broadcasting the information regarding spinal injections. It seems as though it is any steroid injection that could be in play.


WASHINGTON — Federal health officials (click here) have tracked down 12,000 of the roughly 14,000 people who may have received contaminated steroid shots in the nation’s growing meningitis outbreak, warning Thursday that patients will need to keep watch for symptoms of the deadly infection for months.

“We know that we are not out of the woods yet,” Dr. J. Todd Weber of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said as the death toll reached 14.

Of the 170 people sickened in the outbreak, all but one have a rare fungal form of meningitis after receiving suspect steroid shots for back pain, the CDC said. The other case is an ankle infection discovered in Michigan; steroid shots also can be given to treat aching knees, shoulders or other joints.

Fungus has been found in at least 50 vials of an injectable steroid medication made at a specialty compounding pharmacy in Massachusetts, investigators said. Health authorities haven’t yet said how they think the medication was contaminated, but they have ruled out other suspects — other products used in administering the shots — and the focus continues to be on that pharmacy, the New England Compounding Center....