Robert Wargas

How new technology is spreading superbugs

Normally I’m allergic to health scaremongering of any sort, especially if it uses government-funded studies to bolster its dire predictions. But here in America the subject of superbugs – microbes that have developed resistance to the drugs once effective in killing them – has resurfaced with a disturbing and ironic twist. Superbugs already kill 700,000 people a year around the world. Now they are apparently being spread by a surgical camera used to help treat cancer.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced on March 12 that it will convene a panel on the spread of superbugs. The panel is to meet in mid-May. This announcement follows deaths in Los Angeles and North Carolina from carbapenem-resistant enterobacteriaceae, or CRE, which many patients (we can’t be sure how many) contracted following gastroenterological procedures using a device called a duodenoscope.

The duodenoscope is a sophisticated device, a triumph of medical technology – or so it seemed. It’s a form of endoscope – a tube with a lighted video camera on one end of it – that is designed to examine the duodenum, the portion of the small intestine closest to the stomach. It has many applications, including the treatment of intestinal cancer. Unfortunately its sophistication is part of the problem: put simply, it’s so intricate that it is difficult to clean properly.

The duodenoscope is manufactured by the biggest names in camera technology. They include Olympus, which has put out a carefully worded statement saying it’s ‘aware of reports of patient infections following procedures involving duodenoscopes’. I should hope it was ‘aware’ of these reports – suspicion about these instruments has been mounting since 2012. Yet the FDA, which for its part says it became ‘aware’ of the matter in 2013, did not publicly address this issue until this February following pressure from Senator Patty Murray of Washington.

Meanwhile, as Wired reported last week, patients exposed to superbugs ‘have now filed lawsuits against the manufacturers of the duodenoscopes; other suits have blamed hospitals for failing to adequately clean the devices between uses’.

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