Doctors at a San Francisco hospital began an unusual series of kidney transplants on Thursday with six living donors providing organs to six patients in a chain that began with a woman described as an altruistic donor unrelated to any of the recipients. The first donor and recipient went into surgery at California Pacific Medical Center at 7:30 a.m., with two more donor-recipient pairs on the schedule for Thursday, then the remaining three pairs on Friday, hospital spokesman Dean Fryer said. The chain of donations began when Zully Broussard, 55, of Sacramento, whose son and husband both died of cancer, offered to donate a kidney to a friend, but the friend ultimately had to use another donor, according to hospital officials.
Two more hospitals—one in California and one in Connecticut—reported they'd found drug-resistant "superbugs" on a hard-to-clean type of medical equipment that's under federal scrutiny. The devices, called duodenoscopes, have been modified in a way that allows germs to stick to them, the Food and Drug Administration says. They've been blamed for an outbreak of drug-resistant bacteria that's killed at least two patients and infected five more at UCLA's hospital. The university has warned about 180 people that they may have had the same contaminated scope used on them.
A Texas hospital group on Wednesday said it disputes some claims made by nurse Nina Pham, the first person infected with Ebola in the United States who this week sued it for failing to prevent her from contracting the virus and then invading her privacy. Texas Health Resources Chief Executive Barclay Berdan said the hospital complied with government privacy regulations to determine what information to share publicly about Pham's condition and Pham consented to its release, a hospital group spokesman said. He first made the comments in an email sent to staff shortly after the suit was filed on Monday, its spokesman, Wendell Watson, said.
The rate of hospitalization for serious infections among patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) has been on the rise in recent decades, and has increased to a greater extent than for individuals without SLE, a national study found.
Southern California apartment complexes that doubled as "maternity hotels" for Chinese women who want made-in-America babies were raided early Tuesday. The women were funneled to several Orange County hospitals to deliver, but they didn't pay full price — approximately $25,000 — for medical services, officials said. Instead, they got reduced rates for the indigent, ranging from nothing to $4,000, the court papers say. That translated into big losses for the hospitals. More than 400 babies linked to the scheme were born at just one facility in a two-year period, investigators said.