Trial Attorney Blog
Lawyers in Georgia who handle serious injury and wrongful death cases are often confronted with situations where their clients are hospitalized and later acquire a Staph infection which greatly complicates their recovery. We also see cases where clients call complaining about the development of an infection while hospitalized for one condition where the infection becomes much more serious than the condition for which they were originally treated. Regrettably, many people die from these infections.
It just so happens that I ran across an article recently that very succinctly describes this problem. As can be seen, this is not only a problem in Georgia but also a nationwide problem. Because litigation seems to be the best solution we have to deal with this problem, it would seem that the best theory to pursue these cases on would be a failure to warn theory.
Hospitals are always advertising the quality of their services but at the same time are often times concealing their infection rates. If a hospital has a significant infection rate and a patient has no idea when they enter the hospital that they are subject to being exposed to such deadly infections, query whether the best possible legal theory of recovery for such an innocent victim of hospital negligence would be on a failure to warn theory?
Perhaps a review of the article below might stimulate further thoughts along these lines:
Squash the Bug
Europe is killing off hospital infections. Why isn’t the United States following suit?
If you are an American admitted to a hospital in Amsterdam, Toronto, or Copenhagen these days, you’ll be considered a biohazard. Doctors and nurses will likely put you into quarantine while they determine whether you’re carrying methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, a deadly organism that is increasingly common stateside, especially in our hospitals. And if you test positive for methicillin-resistant staph, or MRSA, these European and Canadian hospital workers will don protective gloves, masks, and gowns each time they approach you, and then strip off the gear and scrub down vigorously when they leave your room. The process is known as “search and destroy”–a combat mission that hospitals abroad are undertaking to prevent the spread of germs that resist antibiotics. Our own health authorities, meanwhile, have been strangely reluctant to join the assault.
In the United States, MRSA kills an estimated 13,000 people every year, which means that a hospital patient is 10 times as likely to die of MRSA as an inmate is to be murdered in prison. The latest survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 64 percent of the Staphylococcus-aureus strains in American hospitals were MRSA–that is, resistant to the powerful antibiotic methicillin and other antibiotics–which makes them difficult to treat.
Given the dimensions of the threat, you’d think that the CDC would be making a priority of fighting it. After all, federal health agencies have spent billions to fight anthrax (which caused five deaths in 2001), smallpox (last U.S. death: 1949), and pandemic flu (yet to appear in the United States). And there is reason to think that search and destroy works, since health-care authorities abroad have kept rates of antibiotic-resistant bugs in their countries much lower than ours.
“Why are we spending millions if not billions on bird flu, a ghost that might not happen, when you have thousands being colonized by MRSA and dying of it?” asks Dr. William Jarvis, a top CDC hospital-infection expert until he resigned in 2003. At a March 29 hearing on hospital infections–which, all told, kill an estimated 90,000 patients each year–Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., charged that the CDC had stood by, despite a steady rise in infections since the early 1970s.
The biggest push for search and destroy may come, sadly, from the threat of lawsuits. Several large ones have been settled with hospitals where patients died of infections. Fifteen states have passed laws that require hospitals to report infection rates, and another 28 are considering such legislation. An infectious-disease specialist I know offers a much simpler prescription: Whatever you do, he says, stay out of hospitals.
In Florida, as in the rest of the country, hospitalization for injuries or medical procedures carries a serious risk of a deadly infection. Unfortunately, my clients have little choice when their medical conditions require a hospital stay.
October 21, 2006
By Bob Carroll
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