To our patients and community:
WellSpan Health has been closely monitoring the ongoing investigation being conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and state and local health departments across the country surrounding the recent outbreak of fungal meningitis. We are significantly concerned for the loss of lives and the hundreds of patients and families who have been negatively impacted through this outbreak and our best wishes go out to those who are currently undergoing treatment across the country.
Contaminated injectable steroid medications prepared by and purchased through the New England Compounding Center have been positively linked to both the fungal meningitis cases as well as other joint infections. All facilities that purchased the contaminated steroid products have been identified and the facilities contacted to remove all contaminated product. No WellSpan Health facilities were among those facilities notified and none of the contaminated steroid products implicated have been purchased by any of our facilities. Other injectable products manufactured by the New England Compounding Center have been used at several of our facilities in the past. To date, there have been no confirmed cases of infections resulting from any other products produced by NECC. All NECC products were removed from all WellSpan Health facilities upon initially learning of the outbreak on October 4, 2012.
Because of our overwhelming concern for our patients’ well being, a thorough review of all NECC products used across WellSpan Health facilities has been conducted for the FDA specified period of May 21, 2012 through October 6, 2012. As a result of that review and the FDA’s recommendations, all patients who underwent heart surgery or eye surgery at a WellSpan facility and received a medication purchased from NECC will be contacted via certified letter. This effort to reach out to our patients is being done strictly as a precaution. We will continue to evaluate this developing issue on a daily basis and provide updates to the community as appropriate.
If you were a patient at a WellSpan Health facility during the time period of May 21, 2012 through October 4, 2012 and are concerned that you have a current, active infection that may be related to medications received during the course of your care during that time period, please contact your primary care physician for evaluation.
Symptoms of infection to watch out for include:
- painful, swollen or inflamed (warm and red) joints (if you had a joint injection);
- red, painful eyes with or without drainage or blurry vision (if you had eye surgery); or
- swelling, redness, pain or drainage from a surgical wound or other skin site (if you had another kind of surgery)
If you have these symptoms and they are not the result of some other known problem, then contact your primary care physician for evaluation.
Both the CDC and FDA are providing updates to the ongoing investigation on a regular basis. Those interested in following these updates and the ongoing investigation may do so via the following websites:
CDC - http://www.cdc.gov/hai/outbreaks/meningitis.html
FDA - http://www.fda.gov/Drugs/DrugSafety/ucm322734.htm
Patients may call also call FDA’s Division of Drug Information at 855-543-DRUG (3784) and press * to get the most recent information regarding the outbreak, report an adverse event, or speak directly to a pharmacist.