Posted on 04/18/2009 2:47:19 PM PDT by Never on my watch
The Department of Veterans Affairs says a patient in Georgia is among three people exposed to contaminated medical equipment who have tested positive for HIV.
The VA said Friday initial tests show one patient each from its Augusta; Murfreesboro, Tenn.; and Miami medical facilities has the virus that causes AIDS.
(Excerpt) Read more at 13wmaz.com ...
It is difficult to understand how this could have happened on a nationwide basis. You can I suppose understand how one facility with an incompetent idiot running it would get it wrong, but having it happen over multiple facilities is incomprehesible.
How would you like to hear the Dr. say “good enough for government work” as you wake from anesthesia.
This is shameful and criminal!
Easy. The VA is socialized medicine.
Personally, even though I don’t know all the details about the incident, I think this incident has been fully blown out of proportion by the liberal news media that would love to see the end of the VA hospitals networks. My gut feeling is if we get some sort of national health care system in the U.S. they will attempt to enroll the veterans that depend on the VA into the new national health care system where they would probably get less care, and probably quality care.
These HIV positive vets have been unknowingly exposing their wives to infection.
No, the article says endoscopies. "they were treated with endoscopic equipment that wasn't properly sterilized"
Looks like the VA is trying to weasel out of it: "The agency says there's no way to prove patients contracted the illnesses at its facilities."
Yes they are trying run from blame.
It’s not hard to understand at all. They are 100% GOVERNMENT RUN facilities. And this is what the zero has in mind for all of us.
Exactly. There are good docs and nurses at many VA’s, but the system is not what I would want personally for health care. Many US docs, including this one rotated through VAs during training. It was an exercise in frustration. I remember one hot summer night on call, and all the fans in this non-air conditioned VA were pointed at the nursing station. I remember having tests that patients had waited for for days or even weeks canceled because the ‘proper forms weren't filled out’. I remember telling a VA worker that a particular patient needed an emergent CT scan and that the patient could die if he didn't have a diagnosis ASAP, and having the worker tell me essentially ‘so what’, in front of the patients family. I also regret the attitude I picked up during those days, and wish I could go back and spend more time with those same patients and do more than I did. It's not a good system, even though undoubtedly there are some who are happy with their experiences at the VA.
The Government can never be wrong.
Time to slander the victims.
Huh? Isn't this just so much baloney? Viruses have RNA and it's as unique to each individual virus as DNA is to more advanced organisms. So if Joe tests positive for HIV and it's genetically identical to another VA patient's HIV, and both had an endoscopic procedure done at about the same time, but otherwise have noting in common, it seems like it would be pretty much a slam dunk: Joe got it from the dirty endoscope at the VA.
This is the future of socialized medicine, only on a bigger scale.
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