Steroid injections cause deadly outbreak of rare fungal meningitis

Steroid injections cause deadly outbreak of rare fungal meningitis


(NaturalNews) A rare form of fungal meningitis is sweeping the nation,
and the alleged cause is a tainted batch of epidural steroid injections
produced by a Massachusetts-based pharmacy company known as the New England Compounding Center
(NECC). As of October 8, at least 105 people in nine states have been
infected with the disease, known as aspergillus meningitis, and at least
eight people have died as a result of infection.

According to NBC News
and other sources, the fungus was found in unopened vials of
methylprednisolone acetate, an anti-inflammatory corticosteroid drug
commonly used to treat chronic back pain, ulcerative colitis, severe
skin disorders, and various other conditions. The vials were reportedly
shipped to at least 75 clinics in 23 states, and thousands of patients
are said to have received injections in recent months from the tainted
lots.

"Fungal meningitis in general is rare. But aspergillus
meningitis -- the kind we're talking about here -- is super rare and
very serious," says Dr. William Schaffner, president of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases and chairman of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, about the outbreak. "There's no such thing as mild aspergillus meningitis."

Symptoms
of fungal meningitis infection include headache, fever, dizziness,
nausea and slurred speech, and are typically more subtle than both viral
and bacterial meningitis, which are the far more common and contagious
varieties. Fungal meningitis
symptoms can also take weeks or even months to appear, as opposed to
the more common forms of meningitis that manifest within days.

Federal
health officials are urging patients who received an injection at one
of the 75 facilities that administered the potentially tainted
injections after July 1, 2012, and who have showed any potential
symptoms in the weeks that followed, to contact their doctors
immediately. The list of 75 facilities can be accessed here:
http://www.cdc.gov/hai/outbreaks/meningitis-facilities-map.html

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
(CDC), as many as 13,000 people may have received injections from the
allegedly tainted vials. But neither the CDC nor any other agency has
yet begun to question how sealed vials of a steroid drug became infected
with a rare form of fungal meningitis typically found in contaminated soil or fecal matter.

At
this time, NECC has issued a formal recall of all products compounded
and distributed from its Framingham, Massachusetts, facility. For more
information, you can visit the company's website at:
http://www.neccrx.com/


Source:-
http://www.naturalnews.com/037550_steroid_injections_fungal_meningitis_compounding_pharmacies.html