The Senate this week will vote to pass and send to the president’s
desk a bill to help prevent future tragedies like the meningitis
outbreak that has caused 16 deaths and so much pain in Tennessee.
This bill is the result of an agreement I helped the Senate and House reach to clarify who is in charge — who is on the flagpole — for ensuring the safety of sterile compounded drugs like the steroid injections that last year were meant to ease pain but that instead became a nightmare for so many.
Take the story of Diana Reed, who, caring for her husband who suffers from Lou Gehrig’s disease, was herself suffering with neck pain. She tried a series of epidural steroid injections and found herself diagnosed with meningitis from the injections. Only a few weeks later, a thousand people packed Otter Creek Church in Brentwood for her funeral.
Fungal meningitis is a horrible way to die. Diana’s is only one story, and it’s one story too many.
FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg told us last year that if Congress failed to act, a crisis like the meningitis outbreak was “a matter of when, not if.”
continue to read here
This bill is the result of an agreement I helped the Senate and House reach to clarify who is in charge — who is on the flagpole — for ensuring the safety of sterile compounded drugs like the steroid injections that last year were meant to ease pain but that instead became a nightmare for so many.
Take the story of Diana Reed, who, caring for her husband who suffers from Lou Gehrig’s disease, was herself suffering with neck pain. She tried a series of epidural steroid injections and found herself diagnosed with meningitis from the injections. Only a few weeks later, a thousand people packed Otter Creek Church in Brentwood for her funeral.
Fungal meningitis is a horrible way to die. Diana’s is only one story, and it’s one story too many.
FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg told us last year that if Congress failed to act, a crisis like the meningitis outbreak was “a matter of when, not if.”
continue to read here