The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned open-heart surgery patients recently that they were at risk of a deadly infection linked to a medical device used during their operations. Now worried consumers say they are having a hard time getting information from hospitals and doctors about what they should do.
More than a half-million patients could have been exposed to bacteria that can cause serious illness or death. That's the estimated number of patients who had open-chest surgery involving potentially contaminated equipment in the last several years. The bacteria are a type of nontuberculous mycobacteria, or NTM. Although infections are rare, experts are worried because patients may not develop symptoms or signs of infection for months, so diagnosis may be missed or delayed.
The device is a heater-cooler unit, which helps keep a patient's circulating blood at a specific temperature during operations. It's used in an estimated 250,000 surgeries in the United States every year, including cardiac bypass, valve replacement and liver transplants. About 60 percent of these procedures use the German-made model that has been linked to the infections, the Stöckert 3T heater-cooler, made by LivaNova PLC, formerly Sorin Group Deutschland GmbH.
