Beasley, Allen, Crow, Methvin, Portis & Miles, P.C.

In an effort to ship heparin- and saline-filled syringes faster, workers at a facility in North Carolina failed to check sterility and then falsified manufacturing dates to make it appear those safeguards were followed, according to an Associated Press report. Those syringes, as it turned out, were tainted with a bacteria known as Serratia marcescens and may have lead to five deaths and hundreds of infections in those who received them.

Earlier this week two former workers at the plant, plant manager Aniruddha Patel and quality control director Ravindra Kumar Sharma, were sentenced in federal court to more than four years in prison for allowing the tainted drugs into hospitals and clinics in Colorado, Florida, Illinois and Texas. Last week, the company’s chief executive, Dushyant Patel, was indicted on 10 charges for fraud and selling adulterated medical devices. A warrant is out for his arrest.

The drugs were not produced at the plant, but were put into the syringes and shipped to the hospitals and clinics from there. According to Patel, the company recalled the syringes a year ago after federal officials began investigating the outbreak.

“Citizens in this country trust that producers of medical devices aren’t lying when they say that have adequately tested a given product,” said U.S. Attorney George Holding to the Associated Press. “As we’ve seen in this case, such lies can literally mean the difference between life and death.”

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