Veterans exposed to nasty diseases through unwashed colonoscopy tubing

I don't usually start News topics because THIS is my news source, but I caught the 6:30 a few days ago and, well...

Quote :

Lawmakers sharply criticized the Department of Veterans Affairs on
Tuesday about why a national scare over botched colonoscopies earlier
this year didn't prompt stronger safeguards at the agency's medical
centers.


Agency officials apologized for the continued weaknesses and told a
House subcommittee that they would do better. VA Secretary Eric
Shinseki said he was taking disciplinary action.


The strong reaction came as the agency's inspector general reported
that fewer than half of VA facilities selected for surprise inspections
last month had proper training and guidelines in place. That was months
after the VA launched a nationwide safety campaign over the discovery
of errors at facilities in Georgia, Florida and Tennessee that could
have exposed veterans to HIV and other infections.

Well, okay, that's...really bad, but it's just a few isolated incidents, right?

Quote :

In February, the VA began warning about 10,000 former patients in
Georgia, Tennessee and Florida - some who had colonoscopies and other
endoscopic procedures as far back as 2003 - that they may have been
exposed to infections. They were advised to get blood tests for HIV and
hepatitis.

Fuuuuck.

Quote :

CBS News medical correspondent Jonathan LaPook has performed thousands of colonoscopies.


"What stops contaminated fluids from backing up into this tube is
this crucial green valve," he said, illustrating with a colonoscopy
tube. "Investigators found not only was this valve missing, but this
tubing wasn't being cleaned in between patients."

Remember, kids, if you colonoscopy without a condom, you're colonoscopying with everyone that colonoscopy tube has ever colonoscopied. Also, my OCD is dry-heaving.

They're unsure if anyone was actually infected, but the sheer ick factor and the neglect, especially toward vets of all people, made me think of you guys. Have at it.

Delcat wrote:

Remember, kids, if you colonoscopy without a condom, you're colonoscopying with everyone that colonoscopy tube has ever colonoscopied. Also, my OCD is dry-heaving.

Hell, my OCD is dry-heaving, and I don't even have OCD.

I mean, lack of training, maybe the people performing them didn't know nuthin' about no valve. But even if you walk out on your garbageman job and straight into colonoscopying, who the hell doesn't think "hm, someone's ass. Now, this guy's ass. Hm, rinse maybe?"??

Jesus fuck. Those poor guys. D:

Shiiit, the last time I read about patients being treated this poorly, it was the Tuskegee Syphilis Study in the years of the Great Depression.

Oh God, that's vile. Those poor, poor guys. I hope nobody actually caught anything nasty.

God DAMN. And people wonder why I hate hospitals. Every time I hear stories like this, my unease of going to the hospital gets cranked up a notch.

As if what Delcat posted wasn't bad enough

Quote :

For patients with prostate cancer, it is a common surgical procedure: a doctor implants dozens of radioactive seeds to attack the disease. But when Dr. Gary D. Kao treated one patient at the veterans’ hospital in Philadelphia, his aim was more than a little off...

Had the government responded more aggressively, it might have uncovered a rogue cancer unit at the hospital, one that operated with virtually no outside scrutiny and botched 92 of 116 cancer treatments over a span of more than six years — and then kept quiet about it, according to interviews with investigators, government officials and public records.

The team continued implants for a year even though the equipment that measured whether patients received the proper radiation dose was broken. The radiation safety committee at the Veterans Affairs hospital knew of this problem but took no action, records show.

Seriously, wasn't the Walter Reed scandal enough for the VA to get off its duff and find out who's doing it right and who's doing it wrong?

I knew from work that the VA had Issues. But... JESUS FUCKING CHRIST. I'm so angry my hands are shaking.

My dad is a veteran and I would kill the doctor if he did anything this incompetent. This is only one in a long line of fuck ups by the VA and as sad as this situation is, it does not surprise me in the slightest.

Wasn't there an expose a few years back on the horrible conditions of VA hospitals? It was 20/20 IIRC, so there's a grain of salt there, but...there were vets talking about maggots, and...ugh, it doesn't bear thinking about. And this isn't even counting the PSTD that gets swept under the rug. A woman in my class used to talk about how her husband would have terrible flashback nightmares about Afghanistan every night and there was nothing they could do about it. It was just...there, and they had to deal with it.

Delcat wrote:

And this isn't even counting the PSTD that gets swept under the rug. A woman in my class used to talk about how her husband would have terrible flashback nightmares about Afghanistan every night and there was nothing they could do about it. It was just...there, and they had to deal with it.

This. I grew up across the street from a Vietnam veteran with PTSD, and he never did get over it. He finally drank himself to death a few years ago.

Delcat wrote:

And this isn't even counting the PSTD that gets swept under the rug. A woman in my class used to talk about how her husband would have terrible flashback nightmares about Afghanistan every night and there was nothing they could do about it. It was just...there, and they had to deal with it.

I have a friend who's an Army psychologist, and he's said part of it is the culture of the military. To them, asking for help like that is showing weakness. Soldiers (both enlisted and commissioned) worry that to admit weakness will end their careers, or at least result in them never holding a command or a position of authority again.

That's also why suicides are up among returning combat veterans - they can't deal with it, don't want to ask for help, and so decide the only way out is to eat their service weapon.

Plus there is a lot (and I mean a lot) of situations where the military decides to administratively separate a soldier with PTSD, and then claim they had "personality problems" before they signed up so as to deny them VA benefits. And even if they have benefits, there are way too many soldiers coming back (thanks to improvements in battlefield medicine) and not enough doctors to go around.

Adding to that--forgive my Psych student stepping out again--vets are having a much tougher time in recent wars because we've changed the way we dispatch troops. It used to be that soldiers were dispatched as a single unit that went out and came home as a group. These days, everyone has their own date of departure and homecoming. Apparently his leads to less common feeling in a unit, as everyone's thinking of their individual trip home instead of getting back together, and to less common feeling when they do return. Think about it--in WWII, when soldiers came home, there were parades and parties. These days, stragglers show up at random airports and are sometimes lucky if their family can even make it off work. And that says nothing of the civilian scorn visited on soldiers of Vietnam and Iraq...

It's a hot tranny mess, all right. Just a hot tranny mess.

Delcat wrote:

It's a hot tranny mess, all right. Just a hot tranny mess.

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What is it with this country and our vets? We can't be arsed (no pun intended) to rinse something off now? C'mon.

My grandpa was a Korean war veteran, and in his last days, he was treated rather decently by the VA, ordinary annoyances aside. Of course, this was 1999-2000, before it went to shit. The system apparently couldn't handle post-2001 events, which is a pity, because it used to be competent, if never really great.

I'm not sure they were ever even competent. One of the most vivid memories of my childhood is going to visit one of my dad's brothers at the Veteran's Hospital, where he was dying on cancer. I would've been around seven, so it was probably 1966, and what I remember most is that they had a huge ward, with probably 15-20 guys in it, in various stages of death and decay. Some were suffering from PTSD (they called it shell-shock back then), and either just lay in bed staring at the ceiling or were strapped to their beds screaming. There were amputees who, from the smell, probably weren't having their stumps properly taken care of. I don't recall seeing a single nurse in the room during the time we were there, which was at least a half-hour.

I remember it scared the shit outta me. And here we are, 43 years later, and apparently, nothing's changed.