Monday, November 5, 2012

The Doctor’s World Chasing Clues to Detect Outbreak By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN, M.D. Published: November 5, 2012


The e-mail Dr. Marion A. Kainer received on Sept. 18 suggested an investigation of a case of fungal meningitis and stroke in a man whose immune system was normal and whose only risk for the infection was a spinal injection of a steroid.
  “Alarm bells went off” because of its rarity, Dr. Kainer, an epidemiologist at the Tennessee health department, said in an interview.
She immediately began what became a national investigation that has now identified 409 cases, including 30 deaths, from a fungus so unusual that it is not in medical textbooks. The fungus was transmitted through injections of a contaminated steroid drug prepared by the New England Compounding Center in Framingham, Mass.
Dr. Kainer’s investigation led Tennessee to take extraordinary measures to track down 1,009 people at risk of the fungal infection. The state is credited as the driving force in discovering one of the most shocking outbreaks in the annals of American medicine.

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