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How can syringe misuse, lack of data happen now?

Joye Brown

November 15, 2007

Hepatitis killed my mother.

She contracted it in a blood transfusion, back in the days before most people knew better; it damaged her liver and ultimately took her life; and it affects my life every time I ponder how she never got to hold my children.

That was then. And this is now. So, forgive me, please for raging against a doctor and two institutions - the Nassau and New York State health departments.

It is inconceivable to me that - despite decades of medical advancements since my mother's infection - a physician would reuse a syringe. Or that he would, more than once, refill a single syringe from a vial of medication destined to shoot through the skin of more than one patient.

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"The doctor seems to have gotten away, officially, anyway," Sen. Carl Marcellino, who represents a portion of the area where the doctor practices, told me last evening, after speaking with the state Health Department.

"The man has no official reprimand, and I find that troubling, at the very least," he said, "because he violated basic medical principles and now two people are seriously ill with a life-threatening disease."

How could a doctor do this for so long?

There were no answers yesterday.

Instead, the state Health Department repeated that the doctor's ministrations had spread hepatitis C to two patients - no - make that two people. The Nassau and New York State health departments, during a site visit, actually saw the doctor reusing syringes, officials said.

The state did move quickly to notify 98 people who had been treated the week before, the day of, and the week after he saw the patients later found to be carrying hepatitis C.

And after the doctor volunteered that he'd been using the same procedure for five years, the state began to assemble a list that would grow to 628 more patients.

On Saturday, the department sent out letters telling them to get to a doctor for HIV and hepatitis tests. On Tuesday, the department sent out a news release, saying it had sent out the letters. It was done, all of it, county and state health department officials told me, by the book.

Except that it took too long, left open too many questions and left too many patients panicking.

Yesterday, County Executive Thomas Suozzi called a news conference and said that negotiations between the doctor's lawyers and the state slowed the release of information. If so, it's outrageous.

But when the information went out, finally, all hell broke loose.

What doctor? What clinic?

"It's scaring the hell out of everybody," said Assemb. Charles Lavine, whose district includes the doctor's practice.

Judy Jacobs, whose county legislative district also includes the clinic, said, "It's unbelievable that people would have to wait months, years to find out they may have been exposed to HIV or hepatitis. How could this happen?"

Here's part of the answer:

The state and, to a lesser degree, the county, health departments put protecting the doctor before protecting the public.