Why the coverup over naming hospitals where kids are dying from fungus?
Moms and dads, listen up.
Three infants at a Nevada hospital were infected with a deadly fungus — Candida auris — because echocardiogram equipment used on the babies had been inadequately cleaned and was still contaminated from previous patients.
One of the infants died.
A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention investigator reported the tragic details at the annual Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America conference last week.
But the CDC omitted one fact — the name of the hospital.
Expectant mothers would want to know which hospital, to avoid exposing their newborns.
The CDC, though, keeps a stranglehold on the information patients and parents need.
It refers to a hospital with an outbreak as “Hospital A,” hiding the name.
In New York, a Candida auris hot spot, state health officials also keep mum about which hospitals are most affected.
These public-health officials are paid by us, but they cater to the hospital industry and keep us in the dark.
Between 30% and 60% of patients who get infected with Candida auris die.
The fungus is spreading at what the CDC warned March 20 is “an alarming rate.”
Scientists speculate that global warming is to blame for this fungus suddenly attacking human beings.
Maybe so. But the real environmental issue is the hospital environment.
Hospitals aren’t clean enough.
CDC investigators traced a 2020 Candida auris outbreak at a Florida hospital — disguised as “Hospital A” — to medical equipment not being disinfected between patients. Yuck.
Workers also failed to clean their hands before touching patients.
When the hospital corrected these failures, the outbreak ended.
Similarly, a New York state Department of Health researcher found that at health facilities struggling with Candida auris, equipment to take vital signs was reused without cleaning, spreading the fungus from one patient to the next.
Why shield these lax hospitals from accountability?
The public wouldn’t tolerate officials concealing which restaurants have food-poisoning outbreaks or covering up which carrier is involved in a plane crash.
To find out which Nevada hospital allowed Candida auris to attack the infants, the Las Vegas Review-Journal had to file a public-records request, something ordinary citizens should not have to do.
The outbreak happened at Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center.
Sunrise’s chief medical officer rejected any suggestion that lax disinfection is to blame, telling the paper that patients likely came into the hospital with the fungus.
That doesn’t pass the smell test.
Two of the infected babies were born there and had never left.
The CDC’s unwillingness to name hospitals is causing the fungus to spread faster.
In 2016, New York and New Jersey were ground zero.
Now it has spread to 28 states.
Once patients are exposed to the fungus, it grows on their skin indefinitely.
Only 5% to 10% of these “colonized” patients develop infections, but all become silent carriers.
If they are later treated at another hospital, they unintentionally introduce the fungus there.
That’s how it has spread from state to state.
In 2016, the CDC reported a case in a Maryland hospital, brought there by a patient treated six months earlier in a New Jersey hospital that had the fungus.
It clings to nurses’ uniforms, privacy curtains, mattresses, blood-pressure cuffs, walls and even ceilings for weeks, ready to sicken patients.
You don’t want to be treated in a hospital overwhelmed with this fungus.
But health bureaucrats have made it hard to find out.
New York’s Department of Health kept mum in 2016 when the first cases were found in hospitals here.
Had the state publicly identified those hospitals, other institutions everywhere could have taken special precautions to screen and isolate patients coming from these affected facilities and curbed the spread.
Last week, DOH reported an 86% increase in Candida auris cases in New York over the past three years. State health officials are largely to blame.
If you have health problems or you’re planning to give birth, you need to know where the hospital risks are.
Demand that public-health officials deal honestly with us and stop covering for the hospitals.
Betsy McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York and chairman of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths.
Twitter: @Betsy_McCaughey
