Saturday, February 21, 2015

Went on CNN to discuss the 7 cases of CRE that occurred with 2 deaths at UCLA in association with contamination of duodenoscope used for ERCP. Press is trying to blame FDA since FDA knew about the problem with duodenoscope contamination for a few years. I did not throw FDA under the bus since there is not much they can do about it except to alert hospitals to clean the instruments as best as possible. Cannot pull the 20,000 or so instruments (made by Olympus) since 500,000 procedures are done in the USA each year and many are life-saving and avoid serious surgery. It is a risk/benefit issue. Peggy Hamburg ran into Chris in Safeway and Peggy must have seen the CNN interview since she told Chris to thank me for not throwing FDA under the bus.