By Emily Sullivan
Associate Editor
I’ve lived in the Olean area almost my whole life. No matter where I have moved to, it was always within a 20-minute drive from good old Olean. I rely on the city for everything; if you’ve ever been to Portville or Allegany, you know there isn’t much in the way of grocery stores or things to do, except for Olean.
But the one thing most residents of this area rely on whether you live in Olean, Allegany or Portville is Olean General Hospital (OGH).
My entire life, I’ve trusted OGH to take care of my family and friends whenever they were sick and needed to be hospitalized. When my grandpa fell and hit his head or when I just needed to get blood work done, the first place we went was OGH.
I cannot even begin to convey how scared I was when I found out any patient who has received insulin shots since November 2009 until January may have been exposed to HIV, hepatitis B or hepatitis C, according to a Jan. 24 Huffington Post article.
OGH sent letters to 1,915 patients advising them to undergo blood testing to make sure they weren’t exposed to any diseases when they received insulin injections. OGH is following the same procedure as the Veterans Affairs hospital in Buffalo after a similar incident with about 700 patients between October 2010 and November 2012, as reported in the same article.
Even though the risk of infection from insulin pen re-use is small, it is possible, said Timothy Finan, president and chief executive of Upper Allegheny Health System, according to the same article.
Despite that, it still bothers me that something like this could happen in the hospital my family has trusted for so long and the very hospital I was born in.
Federal health agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), have been telling people not to share insulin pens for a few years. In March 2009, the FDA released an alert because 2,000 patients between 2007 and 2009 could have been exposed to needle contamination in a Texas hospital.
“Interviews with nursing staff indicated that the practice of using one patient’s insulin pen for other patients may have occurred on some patients,” Finan said.
If the FDA is warning against reusing insulin pens on multiple people, why even take the risk? With incurable diseases like HIV which spread through even the smallest amount of blood, sharing insulin pens is just a bad idea.
I know the staff of OGH didn’t do this on purpose. Obviously, no one wants to purposely transmit such horrible diseases. But to be so careless about something that is so dangerous really disturbs me—I’ve put so much trust in this hospital over the years.
I can only hope that all those who had to deal with the possibility of being infected walked away with a clean bill of health.
It’s horrible to think one stupid mistake could completely ruin the lives of 1,915 people.
