Health News

New Hampshire Hospital Worker Gets 39 Years in Hepatitis Case

A traveling medical technician was sentenced Monday to 39 years in prison for stealing painkillers and infecting dozens of patients in four states with hepatitis C through tainted syringes.

David Kwiatkowski, 34, was a cardiac technologist in 18 hospitals in seven states before being hired at New Hampshire’s Exeter Hospital in 2011. He had moved from job to job despite being fired at least four times over allegations of drug use and theft. Since his arrest last year, 46 people have been diagnosed with the same strain of hepatitis C he carries.

Kwiatkowski admitted stealing painkillers and replacing them with saline-filled syringes tainted with his blood. He pleaded guilty in August to 16 federal drug charges.

He apologized Monday, saying he was very sorry what he done.

Prosecutors had pushed for a 40-year prison sentence, saying he created a “national public health crisis,” put a significant number of people at risk and caused substantial physical and emotional harm to a large number of victims.

Defense lawyers argued that a 30-year sentence would better balance the seriousness of the crimes against Kwiatkowski’s mental and emotional problems and his addiction to drugs and alcohol, which they said clouded his judgment.

In all, 32 patients were infected in New Hampshire, seven in Maryland, six in Kansas and one in Pennsylvania. Kwiatkowski, 34, also worked in Michigan, New York, Arizona and Georgia.

Two of the 16 charges stem from the case of a Kansas patient who has since died. Authorities say hepatitis C, a blood-borne virus that can cause liver disease and chronic health problems, played a contributing role.

Linda Ficken, 71, of Andover, Kan., was one of two Kansas victims attending Monday’s sentencing hearing. She underwent a cardiac catheterization at Hays Medical Center in Hays, Kan., in 2010, and said she is haunted by the memory of Kwiatkowski standing at her bedside for more than an hour, applying pressure to the catheter’s entry site in her leg to control a bleeding problem.

Ficken told The Associated Press last week that while she has struggled with fatigue since her diagnosis, a bigger blow came last month when her brother was diagnosed with leukemia and was told he needs a stem cell transplant. While siblings often are the closest match, she can’t donate because of her hepatitis C status.

In a written statement to the court, she told Kwiatkowski she would like to see him spend the rest of his life “locked away from society, in a prison that provides you the ultimate hell on earth which you so deserve.”

Source: Time

Brighten up tired eyes

Tired of being told you look tired? Here’s how to get rid of eye bags, puffiness, dark shadows, and circles.

Morning-After Puffy Eyes

Seasonal allergies, a cold, a sinus infection: These are some of the things that can lead to water building up under the eye.
“We have the thinnest skin around our eyes, so it’s the area that’s most influenced by the in-and-out flow of fluids,” Goldburt says.
A dinner heavy with salty food or a night of crying while watching a tearjerker movie can also cause morning-after puffiness. The reason is osmosis. “Water always travels from areas in the body where there’s low salt concentration to tissues where there’s more salt, Goldburt explains. That principle holds true whether the salt comes from tears or from soy sauce.
Simple Fixes for Under-Eye Bags
Addressing the underlying cause will help treat these temporary eruptions of puffiness.
Here are steps to try:
Treat hay fever, if that’s the problem. There are non-sedating, over-the-counter allergy medications that may help. If you have or suspect hay fever, talk with your doctor about how to treat it (whether or not it’s affecting your eyes’ appearance).
Try a neti pot. Irrigating the nasal cavity with a neti pot — a device that looks like a small teapot — can help relieve fluid buildup caused by allergies, sinus congestion, or a cold.
Switch your sleep position. Your sleep position may be contributing to under-eye bags. Thanks to gravity, sleeping on your side or stomach can encourage fluids to collect under your eyes. If you’re a side sleeper, you may notice a heavier bag on the side you sleep on. Goldburt advises her patients who wake up with puffy eyes to sleep on their back and add an extra pillow under their head.
Changing your sleep position takes some getting used to, says Goldburt, a self-described “former eye-bag sufferer” and stomach-sleeper herself. Still, she says, “The earlier you start changing your sleep position, the better, because after a few years under-eye bags can became permanent.”
Other everyday habits, including rubbing your eyes frequently, going to bed with makeup on, and excessive drinking, can contribute to under-eye bags, too. “Sleeping in eye makeup can irritate your eyes, causing fluids to pool,” Goldburt says. Heavy alcohol drinking causes dehydration . That weakens the delicate skin around the eyes, making it more likely to sink into a pouch.
Eye bags are very common, and are usually not related to your health. But if your bags appear suddenly and you’re not suffering from allergies, a sinus infection, or a cold — and they don’t ease up when you try the lifestyle steps mentioned above — it’s a good idea to see your doctor. Some thyroid or kidney problems can cause under-eye fluid retention, notes New York dermatologist Craig Austin, MD.

Source: health India

 

Pills of the future: nanoparticles

Researchers design drug-carrying nanoparticles that can be taken orally
Drugs delivered by nanoparticles hold promise for targeted treatment of many diseases, including cancer. However, the particles have to be injected into patients, which has limited their usefulness so far.

Now, researchers from MIT and Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) have developed a new type of nanoparticle that can be delivered orally and absorbed through the digestive tract, allowing patients to simply take a pill instead of receiving injections.

In a paper appearing in the Nov. 27 online edition of Science Translational Medicine, the researchers used the particles to demonstrate oral delivery of insulin in mice, but they say the particles could be used to carry any kind of drug that can be encapsulated in a nanoparticle. The new nanoparticles are coated with antibodies that act as a key to unlock receptors found on the surfaces of cells that line the intestine, allowing the nanoparticles to break through the intestinal walls and enter the bloodstream.

This type of drug delivery could be especially useful in developing new treatments for conditions such as high cholesterol or arthritis. Patients with those diseases would be much more likely to take pills regularly than to make frequent visits to a doctor’s office to receive nanoparticle injections, say the researchers.

“If you were a patient and you had a choice, there’s just no question: Patients would always prefer drugs they can take orally,” says Robert Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor at MIT, a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, and an author of the Science Translational Medicine paper.

Lead authors of the paper are former MIT grad student Eric Pridgen and former BWH postdoc Frank Alexis, and the senior author is Omid Farokhzad, director of the Laboratory of Nanomedicine and Biomaterials at BWH. Other authors are Timothy Kuo, a gastroenterologist at BWH; Etgar Levy-Nissenbaum, a former BWH postdoc; Rohit Karnik, an MIT associate professor of mechanical engineering; and Richard Blumberg, co-director of BWH’s Biomedical Research Institute.

No more injections

Several types of nanoparticles carrying chemotherapy drugs or short interfering RNA, which can turn off selected genes, are now in clinical trials to treat cancer and other diseases. These particles exploit the fact that tumors and other diseased tissues are surrounded by leaky blood vessels. After the particles are intravenously injected into patients, they seep through those leaky vessels and release their payload at the tumor site.

For nanoparticles to be taken orally, they need to be able to get through the intestinal lining, which is made of a layer of epithelial cells that join together to form impenetrable barriers called tight junctions.

“The key challenge is how to make a nanoparticle get through this barrier of cells. Whenever cells want to form a barrier, they make these attachments from cell to cell, analogous to a brick wall where the bricks are the cells and the mortar is the attachments, and nothing can penetrate that wall,” Farokhzad says.

Researchers have previously tried to break through this wall by temporarily disrupting the tight junctions, allowing drugs through. However, this approach can have unwanted side effects because when the barriers are broken, harmful bacteria can also get through.

To build nanoparticles that can selectively break through the barrier, the researchers took advantage of previous work that revealed how babies absorb antibodies from their mothers’ milk, boosting their own immune defenses. Those antibodies grab onto a cell surface receptor called the FcRN, granting them access through the cells of the intestinal lining into adjacent blood vessels.

The researchers coated their nanoparticles with Fc proteins — the part of the antibody that binds to the FcRN receptor, which is also found in adult intestinal cells. The nanoparticles, made of a biocompatible polymer called PLA-PEG, can carry a large drug payload, such as insulin, in their core.

After the particles are ingested, the Fc proteins grab on to the FcRN in the intestinal lining and gain entry, bringing the entire nanoparticle along with them.

“It illustrates a very general concept where we can use these receptors to traffic nanoparticles that could contain pretty much anything. Any molecule that has difficulty crossing the barrier could be loaded in the nanoparticle and trafficked across,” Karnik says.

The researchers’ discovery of how this type of particle can penetrate cells is a key step to achieving oral nanoparticle delivery, says Edith Mathiowitz, a professor of molecular pharmacology, physiology, and biotechnology at Brown University.

“Before we understand how these particles are being transported, we can’t develop any delivery system,” says Mathiowitz, who was not part of the research team.

Breaking through barriers

In this study, the researchers demonstrated oral delivery of insulin in mice. Nanoparticles coated with Fc proteins reached the bloodstream 11-fold more efficiently than equivalent nanoparticles without the coating. Furthermore, the amount of insulin delivered was large enough to lower the mice’s blood sugar levels.

The researchers now hope to apply the same principles to designing nanoparticles that can cross other barriers, such as the blood-brain barrier, which prevents many drugs from reaching the brain.

“If you can penetrate the mucosa in the intestine, maybe next you can penetrate the mucosa in the lungs, maybe the blood-brain barrier, maybe the placental barrier,” Farokhzad says.

They are also working on optimizing drug release from the nanoparticles in preparation for further animal tests, either with insulin or other drugs.

The research was funded by a Koch-Prostate Cancer Foundation Award in Nanotherapeutics; the National Cancer Institute Center of Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence at MIT-Harvard; a National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute Program of Excellence in Nanotechnology Award; and the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering.

Source: MIT News

 

Energy Drinks Affect Heart, MRI Scans Show

Energy drinks may provide a bit too much of a boost to your heart, creating additional strain on the organ and causing it to contract more rapidly than usual, German researchers report.

Healthy people who drank energy drinks high in caffeine and taurine experienced significantly increased heart contraction rates an hour later, according to research scheduled for presentation Monday at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America, in Chicago.

The study raises concerns that energy drinks might be bad for the heart, particularly for people who already have heart disease, said Dr. Kim Williams, vice president of the American College of Cardiology.

“We know there are drugs that can improve the function of the heart, but in the long term they have a detrimental effect on the heart,” said Williams, a cardiology professor at Wayne State University School of Medicine, in Detroit.
For example, adrenaline can make the heart race, but such overexertion can wear the heart muscle down, he said. There’s also the possibility that a person could develop an irregular heartbeat.

From 2007 to 2011, the number of emergency room visits related to energy drinks nearly doubled in the United States, rising from slightly more than 10,000 to nearly 21,000, according to a meeting news release. Most of the cases involved young adults aged 18 to 25, followed by people aged 26 to 39.

In the new study, researchers used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to measure the heart function of 18 healthy participants both before and one hour after they consumed an energy drink.

The energy drink contained 400 milligrams of taurine and 32 milligrams of caffeine per 100 milliliters of liquid (about 3.4 ounces). Taurine is an amino acid that plays a number of key roles in the body, and is believed to enhance athletic performance. Caffeine is the natural stimulant that gives coffee its kick.

After downing the energy drink, the participants experienced a 6 percent increase in their heart contraction rate, said study co-author Dr. Jonas Doerner, a radiology resident in the cardiovascular imaging section at the University of Bonn, in Germany.

It appears that the unique blend of sugar, caffeine and taurine in an energy drink may combine to have an effect on the heart, Doerner said. He and his colleagues tested a second group using a drink containing only caffeine, but those patients did not show a significant increase in heart contractions.

“Maybe the mechanism could be from the taurine, or from the combination of taurine and caffeine,” he said.

Because this study was presented at a medical meeting, the data and conclusions should be viewed as preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Source: Web Md

‘One-stop shop’ for tracking diseases in the US

Tracking a nation’s health can be a painstaking business. But now, a team of researchers from the University of Pittsburgh have brought together and digitized all the weekly surveillance reports of diseases in the US since 1888 into one database.

The researchers collated all weekly modifiable disease surveillance tables published between 1888 and 2013 – approximately 6,500 tables. Because of their age, many of these tables were available only in paper format or as PDF scans in online repositories that could not be read by computers and had to be hand-entered.
With an estimated 200 million keystrokes, the data – including death counts, reporting locations, time periods and diseases – were digitized. A total of 56 diseases were reported for at least some period of time during the 125-year time span, with no single disease reported continuously.
Tracing the path of epidemics
Named Project Tycho after Tycho Brahe, a 16th century nobleman whose detailed astronomical observations helped Johannes Kepler derive the laws of planetary motion, the database is free to use and is publicly available.
Dean of the Graduate School of Public Health Dr. Donald Burke explains the

significance of the choice:

“Tycho Brahe’s data were essential to Kepler’s discovery of the laws of planetary motion. Similarly, we hope that our Project Tycho disease database will help spur new, life-saving research on patterns of epidemic infectious disease and the effects of vaccines. Open access to disease surveillance records should be standard practice, and we are working to establish this as the norm worldwide.”
The database enables researchers to track the spread of diseases and also chronicle the impact that vaccines have had in controlling communicable diseases.
The researchers focused on eight vaccine-preventable contagious diseases: smallpox, polio, measles, rubella, mumps, hepatitis A, diphtheria and pertussis.
By overlaying the reported outbreaks with the year of vaccine licensure, the researchers are able to give a clear, visual representation of the effect that vaccines have in controlling communicable diseases.
The results showed that despite a pertussis vaccine being available since the 1920s, the largest outbreak since 1959 was recorded in the US last year. Recurrences of measles, mumps and rubella have also been noticeable since the 1980s.
Lead author Dr. Willem G. van Panhuis, assistant professor of epidemiology at the university, notes:
“Using this database, we estimate that more than 100 million cases of serious childhood contagious diseases have been prevented, thanks to the introduction of vaccines. But we also are able to see a resurgence of some of these diseases in the past several decades as people forget how devastating they can be and start refusing vaccines.”
Steven Buchsbaum, deputy director of Discovery and Translational Sciences for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which partly funded the research, concludes:
“We anticipate this will not only prove to be an invaluable tool permitting researchers around the globe to develop, test and validate epidemiological models, but also has the potential to serve as a model for how other organizations could make similar sets of critical public health data more broadly, publicly available.”

Source: Medical News Today

 

Many Parents Unaware About Medical Research Opportunities for Their Children

A recent poll shows that roughly 44 percent of parents polled claimed they would enroll their child into medical research involving the testing of new medications or vaccines if their child suffered from the disease being studied.

That figure jumped to over 75 percent when the research being conducted involved questions on mental health or diet and nutrition. So why is it only five percent of parents claim they have signed their children up for medical research?
It’s a no-brainer that children’s healthcare can only improve through medical research. The University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health, which surveyed 1,420 parents with a child or children between birth and 17 years of age, claims awareness of medical research opportunities accounts for the low percentage of participants.

Greater than 66 percent of parents polled stated they were not aware of research opportunities for their children. In fact, the poll shows parents who are aware of medical research opportunities are far more likely to have their children take part.
“Children have a better chance of living healthier lives because of vaccinations, new medications and new diagnostic tests. But we wouldn’t have those tools without medical research,” says Matthew M. Davis, MD, MAPP, director of the National Poll on Children’s Health and professor of pediatrics and internal medicine in the University of Michigan Health System.
“With this poll, we wanted to understand parents’ willingness to allow their children to participate in medical research. The good news is that willingness is far higher than the current level of actual engagement in research. This means there is great opportunity for the medical research community to reach out to families and encourage them to take part in improving medical care.”

As mentioned above, the poll differentiated between types of studies and found the willingness of the parents to allow their children to participate was affected by this differentiation. Studies aimed at nutrition and mental illnesses were more positively favored by the parents. However, parents were more reticent about subjecting their children to studies which involved exposure to new medicines or vaccines.
This poll specifically targeted the level of participation by children in medical research since 2007. Over the previous 5 years, the proportion of families where the children have actually taken part in medical research has basically remained unchanged. The figure was four percent in 2007. In both last year’s results and the results reported this year, that figure was only at five percent.
“Five percent of families with children participating may not be enough to support important research efforts that the public has identified in previous polls – things like cures and treatments for childhood cancer, diabetes and assessing the safety of medications and vaccines,” says Davis, who also is professor of public policy at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy.
“But the results indicate that a much bigger percentage of the public does understand the importance of medical research to advancing healthcare for children.”
Though parents in the poll claim they would be willing to allow their children to participate in studies, researchers are too often at a loss of obtaining a significant sample size that could lead to a real difference in healthcare discoveries. If the poll is to be believed, it seems the medical research community needs to focus as much energy on marketing their studies as they do carrying them out.
“This poll shows that the research community needs to step up and find ways to better reach parents about opportunities for children to participate, answer parents’ questions about benefits and risks of participation, and potentially broaden the types of studies available,” Davis says.
Source: Red Orbit

 

Amazing 10 health benefits of bottle gourd

bottle-gourd

Bottle gourd name comes because of its shape. It contains mostly 92% of water. So many are not interested to eat the recipes, curries prepared with this vegetable. It is the one of the ignored vegetable in the Indian cooking. In India it is also called as lauki, Kadhu etc.

Health benefits of bottle gourd

1. Bottle gourd contains the 92% water and the remaining is easily digestible fiber. So it is the easily digestive food.

2. The glucose and sugar related compounds are nearly nil in the bottle gourd. So it the one of the food option for the diabetic patients.

3. This bottle gourd is the one of the body heat control food. It keeps your body temperature at normal level.

4. Bottle gourd juice is widely used for the weight loss. Take the fresh bottle gourd and peel the skin of the veggie and make the bottle gourd into small pieces. Take those pieces into juicer and make them as juice. Filter the juice from the waste. This bottle gourd juice helps to reduce the weight.

5. Bottle gourd helps to reduce the blood sugar levels. Take the bottle gourd in the daily diet or to make the habit of drinking the bottle gourd juice daily helps a lot to the diabetic patients.

6. It helps reduce the inflammations in the liver and kidneys.

7. This bottle gourd juice is also helpful in treating the diarrhea. Take the bottle gourd juice with the pinch of the salt heals the diarrhea.

8. Better food for the persons those who are suffering with the constipation. The water and fiber in the bottle gourd make the digestive system free and active and relive from the constipation.

9. Sesame oil mixed with the bottle gourd in the equal amounts and applied to hair and scalp in before going to bed helps for the good sleep. It is one of the remedy for the insomnia.

10. Bottle gourd helps to treat the urinary tract infection. Take the fresh bottle gourd juice and squeeze the fresh lime in that juice mix the both take it internally. Best remedy for the urinary infections.

Source: beauty health tips

Minimal access lung transplant performed at Chennai hospital

Lung transplant surgeons at Global Health City here claim to have performed India’s first successful minimal access transplant for lung on a 61-year-old recipient

According to the doctors, the surgery was performed on November 24 on Raja Babu Shah who was diagnosed to have Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis several years ago. It is a progressive interstitial lung disease and shows poor response to maximal medical management.

The patient, who had been confined to bed and wheelchair for more than a year, was on the waiting list for lung transplantation under the Cadaver Transplantation Programme of Tamil Nadu since July 2013.

On November 24, a suitable donor became available at Christian Medical College (CMC) Vellore. So Raja was offered a lung transplantation, which would give him a near normal life without oxygen, according to a statement by Global Hospitals.

“Raja Babu Shah is the recipient of India’s first recipient of minimal access lung transplant. He is also the oldest patient in India to receive a lung transplantation and his recuperation is going to be reduced with less pain due to minimal access method adopted,” said Dr Vijil Rahulan, head of department of respiratory medicine and senior consultant pulmonologist, Global Health City.

Dr Jnanesh Thacker, senior consultant cardiovascular and thoracic surgeon and specialist in heart and lung transplantation for Global Hospitals Group, who headed the surgical team, said, “We did a minimal access anterior-axillary thoracotomy with an incision, 7 inches long, just below the nipple. We ensured that the internal mammary artery is preserved.”

Dr Nandkishore Kapadia, senior consultant, cardiovascular and thoracic surgeon, Global Health City, added, “This was like a time bound mission shown in the movies, with the cadaver lung retrieval done at CMC Vellore, transported to Global Health City, Chennai, within a time span of 105 minutes, followed immediately by a four-hour recipient surgery.”

Dr Ravindranath, chairman and managing director, Global Hospitals Group, said, “I was pleased to know that the patient was off the ventilator on the next day and he walked inside his room on the third post operative day.”

Source: India medical Times

New guidance limits antibiotics for common infections in children

Every year, as many as 10 million American children are at risk for side effects from prescribed antibiotics that most likely won’t help them get over an upper respiratory infection, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Many of these upper respiratory infections are caused by viruses, which are not helped by antibiotics.

“Our medicine cabinet is empty of antibiotics to treat some infections,” said CDC Director Tom Frieden, M.D., M.P.H. in a press release. “If doctors prescribe antibiotics carefully and patients take them as prescribed we can preserve these lifesaving drugs and avoid entering a post-antibiotic era.”

The overuse of antibiotics, a significant factor fueling antibiotic resistance, is the focus of a new report Principles of Judicious Antibiotic Prescribing for Bacterial Upper Respiratory Tract Infections in Pediatrics by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) in collaboration with the CDC.

The new report was released to coincide with Get Smart About Antibiotics Week which runs from November 18 – 24.

The AAP has outlined responsible antibiotic prescribing for three common upper respiratory tract infections in children:

• Ear infections
• Sinus infections
• Sore throats

“Many people have the misconception that since antibiotics are commonly used that they are harmless,” said co-author of the report Dr. Lauri Hicks in a press release. “Taking antibiotics when you have a virus can do more harm than good.”

Antibiotic resistance occurs when bacteria evolve and are able to outsmart antibiotics, making even common infections difficult to treat.

Each year more than two million Americans get infections that are resistant to antibiotics and 23,000 die as a result, according to a CDC report from September 2013.

AMA recommendation for clinicians: 3 Principles of Responsible Antibiotic Use

1. Determine the likelihood of a bacterial infection: Antibiotics should not be used for viral diagnoses when a concurrent bacterial infection has been reasonably excluded.

2. Weigh benefits versus harms of antibiotics: Symptom reduction and prevention of complications and secondary cases should be weighed against the risk for side effects and resistance, as well as cost.

3. Implement accurate prescribing strategies: Select an appropriate antibiotic at the appropriate dose for the shortest duration required.

Source: health2fit

Fault sees bugs pumped into hospital ventilation system

Patients at ‘likely catastrophic risk’ because faulty ventilation spreads dangerous infections from operating theatres, documents reveal

ONE of Britain’s first Private Finance Initiative hospitals has subjected patients to “likely catastrophic risk” because a faulty ventilation system installed by the PFI contractor has been spreading dangerous infections from operating theatres into the rest of the building.

In internal papers passed to the local MP, Jesse Norman, and seen by The Sunday Telegraph, consultants engaged by Hereford’s County Hospital say all eight of its operating theatres have “significant ventilation deficiencies” which “are associated with increased infection rates and outbreaks of airborne diseases” in the hospital.

Patients undergoing operations also risked contamination. Derek Smith, chief executive of the hospital’s parent body, Wye Valley NHS Trust, described the failings as an “extreme risk to patients’ safety.”

The hospital patient death rate for the Wye Valley trust, as measured by the NHS’s standard mortality indicator, was 11 per cent above the English average in the last month reported, July 2013 – and as much as 33 per cent above average at one point last year. Hereford County is the trust’s main hospital.

Some of the operating theatres were also built without basic communication equipment, the papers say, meaning surgical teams could not get help in an emergency without leaving the patient.

“During operations, events regularly occur that require additional emergency assistance to be summoned urgently, [such as a] cardiac arrest,” one report, dated last month, says.

“The current method relies on a member of staff using a domestic rape alarm which is thrown into the theatre corridor.”

In one “possible major incident” on September 19 this year, the doctor in charge could not ventilate a patient and needed urgent help.

The team “threw the rape alarm into the corridor as per normal procedure,” but nobody heard and help did not come.

In a letter dated 9 October, and seen by The Sunday Telegraph, Jim McClure, the trust’s PFI contract manager, wrote: “The absence of a fully-compliant nurse and emergency call system in the theatre department presents a serious risk to the health and safety of our patients, demonstrated by two near-misses in the last four weeks where a member of staff could not alert their support team to the need for assistance while dealing with a patient.”

Staff in the hospital’s maternity unit have also been exposed to illegal levels of nitrous oxide gas as a result of faulty equipment.

The gas, used as an anaesthetic for patients, has been leaking, described by Mr McClure in another letter dated 19 November as a “very worrying development” that “needs urgent and immediate attention.”

A number of delivery rooms for expectant mothers were closed because of the problems.

The hospital has also been under a fire enforcement notice for the last year after the new management discovered the building had not been properly “compartmented” to stop the spread of fire.

Supposedly fire-resistant doors and walls installed by the PFI contractor, Mercia Healthcare, did not conform to safety standards or come from any identifiable manufacturer of fire-safe products, an inspection found.

Months of correspondence – including lawyers’ letters – followed as NHS managers attempted to get Mercia to fix the doors.

The hospital was described by Mr Norman as powerless to fix the glaring flaws in the PFI scheme. “The building and equipment have given enormous trouble, but the PFI contract gives the Trust very limited rights,” he said.

“It is incredibly frustrating for the staff, and potentially disastrous for the patients.”

Hereford was one of the first hospitals to open under Gordon Brown’s PFI, where Mercia built the hospital and effectively rented it back to the NHS. The building has a capital value of £64 million, but taxpayers will be forced to pay Mercia a total of £433 million for it over a 30-year period to 2028.

Remarkably, Mercia has also been given the land and assets for a further 95 years after the contract expires, until 2123, raising the possibility that the hospital could be thrown off the site altogether in 2028.

The deal is supposed to include maintenance, but the problems with the ventilation system appear to have arisen in part because it was not properly maintained.

Mr Norman said: “Hereford Hospital has superb doctors and staff.

But it has had to deal over the years with gross underfunding from the NHS, and a terrible PFI contract.

“The operating theatres are intended to be under positive pressure to keep microbes and contamination out, but these documents show that the pressure wasn’t adequate, and contamination was building up.

“In the dirty area, the pressure should reversed to make sure that the bugs stay in. On one of these dirty areas, it appears the ventilation was the wrong way round and has been pushing bugs out into the hospital.”

The hospital operates a “risk management” system, with risks graded from 0 to 25. The operating theatre problems are graded 20, defined as an “almost certain major risk” and a “likely catastrophic” one.

The ventilation problems may have been going on for some considerable time, but were only spotted last month.

Two operating theatres were initially closed, with dozens of operations cancelled and others moved at public expense to the city’s private Nuffield hospital.

Action has been taken to “mitigate” the problems in the other theatres, the documents say, and patient “case selection” is made “on a daily basis.”

Mobile decontamination units have been brought into the wards to reduce airborne microbes.

Hereford is the latest PFI contract to have been criticised for enormously expensive contracts delivering often shoddy buildings.

Two years ago, the Telegraph exposed how taxpayers were paying £229 billion under the initiative for new hospitals, schools and other projects with a capital value of just £56 billion.

Some of the early contracts are due to run for 60 years, meaning taxpayers will be paying for the projects for generations to come.

Many allow massive overcharging for trivial work, such as the PFI hospital which was charged £52,000 to install a smoking shelter.

Some PFI contractors, meanwhile, are earning returns of up to 71 per cent.

Mr Norman, who has been a fierce critic of the PFI, said: “It was my own hospital which drove me to launch a national campaign against the PFI. There has been huge overcharging at Hereford.

Now it appears that Mercia and its sponsors have failed to maintain equipment, ducked necessary improvements and fought to prevent public disclosure.

“Patient safety is absolutely paramout. But however bad Mercia’s performance, it seems there is virtually nothing the Trust can do.”

The hospital said last night that Mercia and its operating contractor, Sodexo, had undertaken “remedial work” in the faulty theatres and they could now be used safely.

“We regret that operations had to be postponed, but all patients who needed urgent operations were treated and we have put in place measures to ensure that postponed operations are now undertaken,” a spokesman said.

“The Trust, together with Mercia/Sodexo, will continue to closely monitor the ventilation performance to ensure that it continues to be safe to use the theatres.”

The spokesman said that the fire enforcement notice was withdrawn last week after improvements were made. She said that the problems with the gas emissions in the maternity unit were being fixed and that all but one of the delivery rooms was now back in use.

She said no mothers had been affected by the gas, only staff.

Source: inagist