Inside sources within Asante have since disclosed details surrounding the reported deaths, per NBC5 News. It is alleged that up to 10 patients died of infections contracted at the hospital.
The sources claim the infections were caused by a nurse who purportedly substituted medication with tap water.
It is alleged that the nurse was attempting to conceal the misuse of the hospital’s pain medication supply — specifically fentanyl — and intensive care unit patients were injected with tap water, causing infections that resulted in fatalities.
Medford police have confirmed their active investigation into the situation at the hospital but have refrained from providing specific details.
The sources indicate that the unsterile tap water led to pseudomonas, a dangerous infection, especially for individuals in poor health, commonly found in a hospital’s ICU.
As awful as diversion is, and as awful as the choice to use tap water was…can we talk about why the tap water is full of pathogenic Pseudomonas?
Tap water is full of stuff that is never harmful for people to drink. Injecting it in your veins, though, is a very very bad idea making me wonder how the hell this nurse got her license. You can’t be THAT stupid
Seriously, couldn’t even be bothered to find some saline so these people in agonizing pain didn’t also have to die of terrible blood infections?
I feel for all the other responsible medical workers who are already dealing with the most ornary customers in the world. This nurse, if they were aware, and all complicit staff have fucked their colleagues over.
I agree that tap water def shouldn’t go into your veins. I also recently did a six month long study on Pseudomonas, and pathogenic Pseudomonas specifically, and feel like I know enough about this bacterial family to be freaked out that that’s what was in the water and killed the people.
Addiction changes people until they don’t even recognize themselves. It has nothing to do with smart vs stupid. They were obviously smart and competent enough to be given a license. It’s just that the person who did this doesn’t even resemble the person who got their nursing license anymore. If they’re able to get sober someday, they’ll be horrified at having to live with this the rest of their life.
There’s a reason addiction is considered a disease. The problem is when people mistake this explanation as an excuse for the things people do while in their addictions. It doesn’t excuse it. I just wish more people would make an effort to understand how addiction actually works because if we made any effort as a society instead of constantly playing the bootstrap/blame game, we could deal with it more effectively and prevent shit like this.
Also I don’t know anything about what’s in tap water, but when addicts use IV drugs that’s pretty much what they’re mixed with. Obviously there’s a lot of infections in that population, but also people who do it every day without tap water killing them.
Just because you can injest something safely doesn’t mean it’s safe to inject. Your stomach acid and enzymes kill many pathogens in low concentrations so the fact that you can’t safely inject tap water doesn’t necessarily reflect badly on the water.
Additionally I’m sure the water facet used to get the tap water wasn’t sterilized either. You wouldn’t want to touch a syringe to your water spigot before using it I’m sure, let alone inject the unsterilized water from it.
Water for injections has super strict requirements for a reason.
Toilet water is not allowed. Water from the bowl at the dog park, also out. Voss is a maybe.
We do not for the same reason environments you live in also have Staphylococcus everywhere and it’s impossible to control but assuming you have an average working body and regularly wash your hands before touching things like a toilet handle and then your face you should be pretty safe. Your skin as the largest protective organ and immune system protect you from this. this goes the same for the assumption that you would ingest water as expected and your entire digestive system protects you a lot from what is in water. They do test water but they don’t test it for things you would come into contact when injecting which bypasses a lot of what your body would do already to protect yourself.
This is why some products like netti potties might suggest distilled or boiled water before filling as it’s not a common way to consume water.