Saturday, August 24, 2013

Study will track long-term effects of meningitis outbreak from compounding nightmare

By Kay Lazar |  GLOBE STAFF   
  AUGUST 24, 2013

 

Federal regulators have launched a study of the long-term health effects of a lethal fungal meningitis outbreak last fall linked to tainted steroids from a Framingham pharmacy.
The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday that it would fund a $216,000 study led by Dr. Peter Pappas, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Alabama School of Medicine, who leads a nationwide consortium of scientists who specialize in fungal infections.
Pappas’s team will track 500 patients from the states hardest hit in the outbreak — Indiana, Michigan, Tennessee, and Virginia — said Dr. Mary Brandt, who leads the CDC’s fungal diseases branch.
Overall, the CDC says medications from the New England Compounding Center of Framingham are believed to have sickened 749 people, including 63 who have since died.
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