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The FDA Doesn’t Care If You Die
(Reuters) – U.S. health regulators have known since at least 2009 that the medical devices at the center of the “superbug” outbreak at UCLA can transmit lethal infections but have not recommended any new safety requirements, a lapse that threatens patient safety, experts in hospital-acquired infections said.
More than five years.
Further, it will only change now (if it does at all) because it’s all over the news.
If you haven’t been following this mess it’s due to a device that is used in various surgical procedures that is inserted down the throat and contains a tiny camera and other instruments. This is seen as a “breakthrough” device but the problem is that the device is hideously expensive, costing upwards of $40,000 each. They are so expensive not because tiny cameras cost a lot of money (the one in your iPhone cost Apple about $5) but because there is no effective competition in the medical instrument space, just as there is no effective competition in most of the medical industry.
But now we add to the cost the fact that the device is hard to sterilize. You can’t put the unit in an autoclave because the camera would be destroyed by the heat. This means it must be chemically sterilized through both antiseptic solutions and manual cleaning (e.g. brush and solution) which takes time. That in turn means a hospital needs to buy more of the devices because of the downtime for cleaning of each after use.
And that, in turn, means that the minimum “required” amount of effort will be used for financial reasons — an effort that has since 2009 been known to be insufficient and has resulted in the transmission of disease.
Don’t worry folks, not only does the medical monopoly game get you up front with the charges, they pocket as much as possible rather than spending it on effective infection control and the government agency allegedly in charge of overseeing all of this does nothing for five years when that procedure is shown to be insufficient.
Delivered by The Daily Sheeple
Contributed by Karl Denninger of Market Ticker.
Karl Denninger is the author of Leverage: How Cheap Money Will Destroy the World. You can follow his daily commentary on capital markets at The Market Ticker and his weekly Ticker Guy Blog Talk Radio broadcasts.
Source: http://www.thedailysheeple.com/the-fda-doesnt-care-if-you-die_022015
