Deadly Meningitis Outbreak, a Question of Oversight: The war on people?

The deadly outbreak of meningitis that has left 30 ill and 5 dead has been traced  to spinal steroid injections, given as an epidural.  This announcement put my family on red alert because my husband has gotten spinal injections in the past, given in epidural form, as an outpatient.

What is the most shocking here is the description of what went wrong.  According to the New York Times:

The outbreak, with 5 people dead and 30 ill in six states, is thought to have been caused by a steroid drug contaminated by a fungus. The steroid solution was not made by a major drug company, but was concocted by a pharmacy in Framingham, Mass., called the New England Compounding Center. Compounding pharmacies make their own drug products, which are not approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

On Monday, federal inspectors at the New England center found a sealed vial of the steroid afloat with so much foreign matter that it could be seen with the naked eye, Food and Drug Administration officials said Thursday. Under the microscope, the particles were a fungus.

The drug has been recalled, the clinics that used it are scrambling to warn patients who might have been exposed and health officials are urging anyone feeling ill after a spinal steroid injection to contact a doctor quickly, especially for symptoms like severe headache, fever, nausea, dizziness, loss of balance or slurred speech. They are also urging doctors and hospitals to stop using any products made by the New England Compounding Center.

The pharmacy had shipped 17,676 vials of this potentially contaminated solution to 75 clinics in 23 states, according to Massachusetts and federal health officials.

The question is, Why? Why would pain clinics around the country rely on a pharmacy that mixes its own brand of unapproved drugs, especially for a delicate procedure like an epidural injection that has the potential — realized in these awful cases — to infect a patient’s nervous system?

There seems to be no one answer. Some doctors say compounding pharmacies offer specialty products or dosages not easily found elsewhere, or sometimes simply better prices than big drug companies.

The medical profession has been extremely careless in the case of these injections.  My husband has had similar (but not the same) injections in the past, outpatient, in a clinic setting.  Does it not send off bells and whistles that this type of spinal tap would be permitted in a clinic outpatient setting without any regulation?  Where are the clinic police?  Where is Ken Cuccinelli?  Where is the General Assembly?  It seems that they have all overlooked the real danger and set their sights, instead,  on making abortion clinics into mini hospitals while totally ignoring other types of medical procedures and the inherent dangers.  Where is the oversight?

Virginia honed in on abortion clinics, under the guise of protecting women and did nothing to regulate pain clinics injecting patients in the spine with drugs that have not been approved by the FDA.  These drugs have contained visible floating fungus.  Additionally, urology clinics, gastrointestinal clinics, dermatology clinics, oral surgery clinics, just to name a few, go unregulated.

Does the hypocrisy ever end?  Probably not.  What is Ken Cuccinelli going to do about the Virginia deaths?