Hepatitis A Lawyer & Attorney : Marler Clark : Hepatitis A Blog

 
Boy, talk about another reason to get your Hepatitis A vaccine! The Veterans Administration (VA) has acknowledged that 16 patients exposed to contaminated equipment at its medical facilities have tested positive for viral infections, including hepatitis.

According to CBS News:

VA spokeswoman Katie Roberts said Friday that 10 colonoscopy patients from the VA medical center in Murfreesboro, Tenn., tested positive for hepatitis. She said six patients from a VA clinic in Augusta, Ga., tested positive for unspecified viral infections.

The number of reported infections could rise. Roberts says the department doesn't yet have results from most of more than 10,000 veterans warned to get blood tests because they could have been exposed to contamination. Patients at a medical center in Miami also were urged to get tested.

All three sites failed to properly sterilize equipment between treatments.

The VA Medical Center in Murfreesboro is named for World War I hero Alvin C. York, who was a native of Pall Mall, Tenn.  For more about this distributing report, check here.

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The war in Mexico between drug dealers and the government last year saw more than 5,300 killed, including 843 just across border in the 120-year old city of Tijuana. Its neighbor to the north is Imperial Beach, CA.

North and south of the Imperial Beach Pier is the Tijuana Estuary at the famed Boca Rio beachbreak. The Tijuana Sloughs is a fabled big-wave surf spot is now almost unrideable due to raw toxic sewage that flows into the break from the Tijuana River.

Now the war in Mexico is literally lapping up against Imperial Beach because so many dead bodies and dismembered bodies are being flushed into the area from the river that the danger to surfers has never been so high.

Because warning signs and health risk notices are not keeping surfers away, a nonprofit environmental group based in Imperial Group called WildCoast, is offering free Hepatitis A vaccines for surfers. In partnership with San Diego State University's Graduate School of Public Health, WildCoast is offering the vaccines at the Imperial Beach Health Center.

For more from KPBS, go here.

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 It use to be that if you were going to pick up children for adoption in a foreign country you were advised to get a Hepatitis A shot before departure.   In a new advisory, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) says if you are going to come into "close contact" with newly adopted children from a foreign country, you should get a Hepatitis A vaccine even if you never leave the good old USA.

Reuters reports:

"Recently, there have been cases of family members who have gotten sick after kids have been adopted," said Dr. Cindy Weinbaum, a medical epidemiologist with the CDC. She said there had been about 20 cases, including a 51-year-old adoptive grandmother who became gravely ill.

Weinbaum said the recommendations cover adoptions from countries with a high or intermediate infection risk.

"That includes most of the world. All that (it) excludes is North America, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Japan," she said.

For more on the CDC advisory, go here.

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