Thousands of former patients at a New Hampshire hospital must wait at least another week to learn if they were infected with hepatitis C through syringes used by a traveling medical technician now known as the “serial infector.”
The New Hampshire health department announced last month that it intended to test more than 3,400 people who had been hospitalized while the technician, David Kwiatkowski, 32, who is believed to have contracted the disease at least two years ago, was working at Exeter Hospital.
Kwiatkowski was charged with federal drug crimes last month, accused of stealing drugs and injecting himself with syringes that were later used on patients. He has worked at an estimated 13 hospitals in eight states and potentially could have infected thousands of patients.
Testing will be delayed as officials continue to try to develop an orderly process that will allow patients from the Exeter Hospital to be tested quickly, said Jose Montero, director of the New Hampshire health department’s division of public health.
Already, patient advocates are pushing for ways to tighten the rules regarding technicians to prevent cases like this from happening again.
Elenore Casey Crane, a former state representative in New Hampshire and co-founder of a group called The Patients Speak, is calling for a national registry to which hospitals and staffing agencies would be required to report issues of professional misconduct by medical technicians. She said that beyond calling previous employers for a reference check, hospitals have no way of knowing whether a technician has previous violations.
Her group is also calling for national licensing of all medical technicians, which at present vary from state to state. It has also prompted legislators in the eight states involved to file bills to require random drug testing of technicians at hospitals twice a year.
“Why does the guy who loads your car at [hardware supply store] Home Depot have drug testing and the men and women with you in the operating room do not?” Crane said.
Her goal is nothing short of changing what she said was the culture of secrecy around medical workers.
Triage Staffing Inc of Nebraska, the agency that placed Kwiatkowski in many of his more recent jobs, has been sued by Domenic Paolini, a malpractice lawyer and former cardiac surgeon in Boston, on behalf of several patients.
He has filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of people whom the health department has recommended be tested, as well as infected patients.
Montero said on Wednesday that almost 1,300 people had been tested, including many hospital employees.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing