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Some criminal masterminds in Florida thought that stealing equipment from the Florida Hospital Center for Diagnostic Pathology was a brilliant idea. Now they have £300,000 in medical machines—loaded with flesh eating bacteria.
The thieves loaded the biohazardous machines in a trailer pulled by a pickup truck, according to police spokesman Sgt. Vince Ogburn. The stolen goods included a slide stainer and a specimen analyser full of vials. Way to go, idiots! I hope you enjoy the process of seeing your arms eaten alive by an invisible zombie. [Orlando Sentinel]
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Or…unwittingly exposing innocent members of the public to the same bacteria.
The real villain here is the Pathology Department who clearly failed to take the necessary precautions to safeguard potentially very damaging contaminated materials.
The original article says it was ‘discarded equipment’. Something has gone very wrong if your discarded equipment has Flesh Eating Bacteria on it..
Ahh, ‘flesh-eating bacteria’ – one of those great inventions of the media and propogated by That Episode Of Scrubs.
There is no such thing as ‘flesh-eating bacteria’. Necrotising fasciitis is destruction of the skin from exotoxins released by the bacteria involved. They don’t ‘eat’ skin.
NF is normally polymicrobial (more than one bacteria gets involved) but most commonly involved is Group A Strep (S. pyogenes) – which actually causes tonsillitis more than it causes NF. Other involved bacteria include S. aureus (part of normal skin flora) and C. perfringens (part of normal gut flora).
SO…corrected title:
“Brilliant Thieves Steal £300,000 In Medical Equipment Loaded With Everyday Bacteria That Will Probably Do Nothing To Them Or They Might Get Tonsillitis Or If They Manage To Administer It To Themselves In A Very Specific Way And Get Very Very Unlikely They Might Just Maybe Maybe Get An Incredibly Rare Skin Infection But To Be Honest You Stand About The Same Chance As Them Just From Getting An Infected Cut”
I appreciate it doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.
Also – Dean, the Pathology department has absolutely nothing to do with waste control. They do the tests to identify bacterial species, yes, but they don’t do any of the cleaning up. This to me sounds like a bunch of idiots went and raided a few sharps bins before they were sent off for incineration.
Dirtymagic86 – on the contrary, I’d say something has gone very right if you’re DISCARDING the equipment with [cough] flesh-eating bacteria [cough] on it. Would you want them to keep it?! Use it, contaminate it, incinerate it. Fresh sterilised tools for the job prevents infection.
Whoa there! By the same token…doctors should just bung foetuses and useless organs in skips out the back of the hospital providing they use the correct colour-coded bag.
Just because something has been “discarded”, doesn’t mean the person who discarded it is absolved of all responsibility for its safe disposal. If that were the case, we’d just chuck radioactive materials into landfill or rivers.
Whilst the thieves are undoubtedly idiots, I would suggest that the Pathology Department in question needs to at least have some kind of review around how their “waste” is disposed of, and how it is secured prior to being taken off-site. It may transpire that the procedures were adequate and the thieves were just incredibly determined, but to say “…the Pathology department has absolutely nothing to do with waste control” is a step too far.
They don’t have anything to do with it! Waste control is performed by independent companies – this is the same in both the UK and the US. “The Pathology Department” is the team of doctors and medical professionals working in the field of Pathology at a hospital. They, like any other department, are issued instruction from the waste management company on which bag to put which bit of waste in. The waste control team are then responsible for collection of said waste and appropriate disposal of it. What you’re implying is that the doctors are to blame.
If you went into work after a heavy one, not feeling great, you know the protocol is to vomit into a bin or toilet. You have been told this by the management, and you follow procedure. If I then found out that your vomit had ended up coming out of a tap into a the feed bottle of a small child, would I blame you? Of course not, I’d blame the sewage team or the rubbish collection team and ask them what they’ve been doing with it.
My only point was that the waste had not yet left the facility. The Doctors might not be personally responsible for the removal of waste, but the department and/or hospital certainly is.
If their “waste control team” (probably sub-contracted) are not ensuring that hazardous waste is housed in an appropriate and secure manner, then the hospital has a responsibility to address the situation and take action accordingly (Perhaps by getting their contractor to look at their procedures or maybe even look at changing contractor).
If I trip over a bag of syringes outside the back of a hospital…I blame the hospital, not the binman or the janitor.
Nothing like a bit of necrotising fasciitis in the morning.
Can you steal that’s been thrown away (I guess laws might be different in the US) ? The equipment was sitting outside the lab by a bin apparently.
Also ‘a substance that could eat away at human skin’ in a pathology lab is probably something rather less exciting that a flesh eating bacteria, like a fixative or some sort of acid. Either way someone’s made a spectacular cock up