[ANGRY] Poor Child.....

[Past_VNE]

DH and I went out for the afternoon with my mom and stepdad.


We were having a nice time when she decided to tell me that she had her cut yesterday and that her 'regular' hairdresser was back. "In fact, it was her first day back from maternity leave."

Let me back up and say that this hairdresser had given my mom quite an earful on my homebirth plans, saying how I was crazy to risk our lives like that and that she intended to have all the safety of a hospital available to her because she loved her baby, etc., etc., etc.

So, my mom asked how everything was and ....the horror.....

She had her baby July 31. On the day she was to go home, they 'didn't really have time to do his circ, so they managed to squeeze him in about 2 hours before they went home.' Well, the circ supposedly went fine.

Got home, baby wouldn't eat. Wouldn't sleep. Started losing weight, got dehydrated. Went to doc. Sent to specialist for being sickly. Became very ill quickly. Went to ER. Fever went higher and higher and just wouldn't go away. Sent to AI duPont, a high-end children's hospital in the area. They said he probably would not survive. Spent three weeks in NICU teetering between life and death. Finally sent home in moderate condition. Do not have more info on his current state.

Diagnosis: Staph infection picked up during initial hospital stay, likely acquired during circumcision.

I feel soooo sad for this boy. And I'm just seething mad to boot. Why is this okay? Aaaaaargh!

I had to vent where I knew people would care.

[Mamm2]

[Sarah]

Drop the anger and give that woman the number of a lawyer. Support her, she had no idea this could happen...

BUT THE HOSPITAL DID. GET ON IT_!!! and maybe you can make a exposee over it- get that hospital in really hot water... inform the public about what is going on... maybe there are other families out there who you don't know about- maybe they need to know about each other.

Report it to the state hospital regulatory comission... report it to the State Medical Board, report it to the CDC!!!

Someone needs to investigate and see if this might be an epedimic in the hospital.

It's amazing to me with reports like this: http://www.cirp.org/library/complications/hoffman1/

"In Aug 1998, a 150-bed naval hospital in eastern North Carolina identified an outbreak in the newborn nursery. Cases were newborn males who had undergone a circumcision procedure and post-discharge required antimicrobial treatment for severe pustulous diaper rash. A total of 36 cases were identified from Aug to Jan 1999."

and this:
http://www.cirp.org/news/newsday10-09-03/

"When Werner returned home, she was shocked to learn that her friend's baby, born two months earlier at St. Catherine, had also picked up a resistant staph infection. The friend, Kelley Gould, said she found out her baby, Kevin, born May 23, was infected when she took him to the pediatrician two weeks after coming home from the hospital for what she thought was a diaper rash."

http://www.cirp.org/library/complications/enzenauer1/
"Gellis eloquently indicted circumcision, noting that the infant "has enough portals of entry for organisms as it is," referring to the infant's nose, mouth, conjunctiva, and the cut end of his umbilicus. "It seems totally unnecessary to aid and abet lurking bacteria by adding a raw wound to his genitalia."19"



These hospitals all habitually offer circumcisions and expose these kids to a risk they KNEW was present and carried by their STAFF.

Put your anger where it belongs and help this family. No one is going to support them in the way that you can. Give her the information she needs.

Love Sarah

[Frankly Speaking]

Hospitals are high risk places for infection particularly by staph infections. A hospital is the most likely place to become infected that you will ever visit. This is not new information. The medical profession has bee well aware of this for more than a century but still are careless about it. The result is that these infections are becoming extremely resistant to the drugs used to fight them. There is legitimate concern that the bacteria will become resistant to the most powerful drug now available before a new drug can be found and developed.

In the late 19th and early 20th century, this problem was recognized as more and more patients died from these infections. They finally figured out that the surfaces throughout the hospital were becoming impregnated with the pathogen and that there was no way to completely eliminate them. The solution to the problem at that time was to build a new hospital every 10-15 years and burn the old one to the ground. That's why you don't see old hospitals.

Hospitals today are so incredibly epensive to build today that burning is not a viable option and they are left to try to deal with the problem the best they can. This is not an easy problem to deal with though. This pathogen is very adaptable and quickly evolves and changes itself to meet new challenges. An example is one hospital started seeing a very high rate of infections in it's surgical patients. Almost every post-op patient was getting these staph infections. the surgical suite was thoroughly cleaned and disinfected but the infections continued unabated. Again, the surgical suite was cleaned but this time, every single piece of equipment was removed and detail cleaned and disinfected. The walls, ceilings and floors were pressure cleaned and disinfected and the equipment was moved back in. This was so thorough that it took several days for the cleaning crew to complete. The infections continued at the same rate as if nothing had been done.

At this point, there was understandable alarm by hospital management and a consultant was called in to determine the source of the infection. After several weeks of investigation, it was found that the bacteria was living in the disinfectant! It had mutated and evolved to live in this hostile and deadly environment and all attempts at eliminating it with the disinfectant was just spreading it around anew.

Most likely this is not the first baby born at that hospital that has suffered an infection like this and most likely the hospital is well aware of the problem. This woman should get a lawyer and have the hospital records subpoenaed to see if a trend can be established. If there were similar infections in the recent past, they should have stopped all circumcisions until the problem could be resolved. They should also stop all circumcisions until the source of this infection is found. Not doing so is reckless and negligent behavior. If there is evidence of negligence, this woman deserves redress and compensation as well as all other parents who have had similar experiences.

One of the ways to end circumcision in this country is to make it dangerous and I don't mean dangerous to the child. I mean dangerous to the doctors and hospitals who go against current policy statements of their professional associations and continue to endanger the lives of children. Make it dangerous to the doctors and hospitals financial viability and it will end. This is the message that the College of Physicians and Surgeons/Saskatchewan is sending to it's members. It took the death of Ryleigh McGinnis to bring it home to them but now they have listened and the circumcision rate in Saskatchewan dropped 25% in a single year. The rate in neighboring Alberta dropped an astonishing 40% that same year. As the AAP states, "the risk outweighs the potential benefits" except in the case of Alberta and Saskatchewan, the risk was to the finances of the doctors and hospitals and the potential benefits were the profits to be pocketed from offering the procedure. Suddenly, doctors understood "risks" and "benefits." Where they had been ignoring the risks inherent in the procedure, they suddenly understood them all too well because they were suddenly risks to their own well being and not so much their patients.





Frank

[~Jenna~]

Poor little boy. Hopefully she can sue the hosptial. If you can get a tv station to do an exposee then the circ rates will probably go down too as an added benefit. I know some people who left their boys intact after the crap that happened at Northside Hospital in Atlanta.

Oh, and hospitals are so freaking nasty. I know that 99% of my coworkers didn't clean their equipment or wash their hands. (Yes I"m guilty of this also : )Our supervisors were supportive of this because they didn't want us to slow down. It was pretty much just get the patients in and out as fast as you can.

[Frankly Speaking]

Jenna:

I don't think you have the whole story about the Northside disaster.

For those who don't know, there were two boys who lost their penises in circumcision accidents at this hospital by two different doctors on the same day and same shift. One of the boys had immediate sexual reassignment surgery and it was never made public what happened to the other. The parents brought suit and the case was settled out of court for $22.8 million.

Strangely, there was almost no change in the circumcision rate after the accidents. The net change was only about 2%, statistically insignificant. The only statistically significant thing was the racial makeup of the circumcision numbers. Northside is in an almost exclusively white, upper middle and upper class neighborhood. There was a statistically significant drop in the circumcision rate of white babies after the accidents. As well as I can remember, it was about 6% but the percentage of black babies circumcised increased dramatically and almost made up for the drop in the circumcision rate of white babies. The question is "Why did that happen?"

I think it is purely and simply that the hospital went on a selling campaign to avoid a disruption in the revenue stream at the hospital. Northside births more babies than any other hospital in Georgia and circumcision is a significant part of their profits.

Was this racism? Probably not. I suspect that almost every single white male born at the hospital was circumcised. However, the percentage of black male babies circumcised in Georgia at the time was significantly less. Obviously, there were some white parents who read of the accidents and absolutely refused to risk their sons in this way. That accounts for the drop in the rate of white circumcisions. There just weren't any more white babies to circumcise to make up for the loss. However, with the significantly lower circumcision rate of black babies, there were enough numbers of them that the parents could be sold (or pressured) on the procedure to almost make up the shortfall. That's all that can explain it. I can imagine the pressure on these parents to circumcise was intense, all for the bottom line.

Within a month of the accidents, the circumcision rate at Northside was back to about the pre-accident levels and several months down the road, had increased to levels higher than before the accidents. That's an amazing recovery considering the horror of what happened. I can only imagine that it took an intense and sophisticated marketing campaign to accomplish this. This happened about 15 years after the AAP first stated the risks outweighed the potential benefits. It's apparent where North$ide'$ prioritie$ lie.




Frank

[~Jenna~]

Well Frank, I guess I thought the #'s went down but that could be because the people I know that left their boys intact are white.

As a side note, Northside almost killed me when I was born. All us babies born that day got e.coli infections. I was lucky enought that my parents got me out of there and took me over to Scottish Rite.