Federal health officials are warning anyone who had open heart surgery since 2011 to be on the alert for possible infection from a contaminated surgical device in wide use.
In an alert issued Thursday, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said a device that heats and cools blood during surgery is suspected of causing dangerous infections months or even years after surgery.
In New Jersey, the N.J. Department of Health will be holding an emergency conference call later today with the 18 hospitals that perform cardiac surgery to review the CDC warning. One of the goals will be to help hospitals devise plans for notifying patients who might be at risk.
“We are also doing outreach to all health care providers so they and their patients can look for signs of potential infection. Patients may not have returned to the same health care provider so is important for all health care providers to be informed,” said Donna Leusner, department spokeswoman.
New Jersey has no confirmed cases of the infection, she said.
A quarter-million Americans have heart bypass surgery every year – the kind of surgery that requires a device to heat or cool the blood during the operation. About 60 percent of those cases use the brand of heater-cooler implicated in spreading the bacteria to patients, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
At hospitals that have already had one patient develop an infection, the chance that other heart surgery patients will also become infected is between 1 in 100 to 1 in 1,000.
The risk is higher for patients who receive replacement heart valves or vascular grafts.
Earlier reports indicated a cluster of 12 cases reported in York, Pennsylvania, with cases also documented in Iowa and Michigan as well.
The infection can be deadly. Patients who experience night sweats, fever, fatigue or weight loss after heart bypass surgery should contact their health care provider.
The culprit bacteria can take months for an infection acquired through to become noticeable, the CDC said.
The bacteria, Mycobacterium chimaera, is a species of non-tuberculous mycobacterium (NTM) often found in soil and water. In the environment, M. chimaera rarely makes healthy people sick,” the CDC warning stated.
“Patients who have been exposed to the bacteria through open-heart surgery can develop general and nonspecific symptoms that can often take months to develop. As a result, diagnosis of these infections can be missed or delayed, sometimes for years, making these infections more difficult to treat.”
The device, called a Stöckert 3T heater-cooler, is manufactured in Germany by LivaNova PLC (formerly Sorin Group Deutschland GmbH.) The CDC’s concern follows similar worries in Europe about the device.
U.S. Health officials had warned earlier about possible contamination, but are now ramping up their alert to reach health providers and patients directly.
Swiss researchers recently announced the culprit bacteria continued to show up in water samples taken from the machines despite rigorous cleaning and disinfecting, pointing to the possibility the devices were contaminated during their manufacture.
http://www.nj.com/healthfit/index.ssf/2016/10/cdc_warns_heart_patients_of_contaminated_surgical.html