Posted on 05/31/2010 4:11:09 PM PDT by naturalman1975
PATIENTS of a late-term abortion clinic in Victoria may have been deliberately infected with hepatitis C after a further 32 women tested positive to the virus, bringing to 44 the total number of infections.
Health authorities and police are investigating allegations a cluster of patients of Melbourne's Croydon Day Surgery became infected with hepatitis C when James Latham Peters worked as an anaesthetist at the clinic over an 18 month period in 2008 and 2009.
The state's chief medical officer, John Carnie, said more than 1100 women who attended the clinic had been contacted for blood tests, with 44 so far testing positive to hepatitis C.
That contact was made after health authorities confirmed in April that 12 women who attended the Croydon Day Surgery became infected with hepatitis C, all of whom were linked directly to the clinic, and nine to the anaesthetist himself.
Since then, Dr Carnie said, 32 additional patients had tested positive to the virus and further genetic testing had linked 13 of those cases to the clinic.
"The more cases you find in this instance, it becomes more and more difficult to explain this by an accidental means," Dr Carnie said yesterday.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.com.au ...
They still are not saying how it happened? HepC is passed either by blood transfer or by sexual contact...how did they get infected?
The allegation seems to be that he either injected or otherwise exposed them to infected blood.
Medical instruments still coated with infected blood is an option, as is reuse of needles carrying the pathogen.
Those sound about right, considering it is an abortuary we're talking about.
Right! I thought it was spread similarly to the way AIDS is spread. Beyone that, I can’t believe the nonreporting going on here? Has no one else in the general Victoria population been diagnosed with HepC? If so, what’s the count? Is there no relationship at all to the promiscuity behind the need for many an abortion and the spread of HepC? Is the doctor in question the ONLY staffer who might be interested in infecting “patients”?
I remember back in 1984 or 85 being advised by military medical staff that I needed to have a thorough blood workup because I’d been exposed via transfusion to preAIDS-tested (1983) blood. Tests would also have shown HepC infection. They’ve been linked in my mind ever since.
Sorry — really garbled that first line! Fingers outpacing brain.
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