Heparin Syringes Result in Deaths

FAQS (Frequently Asked Questions Regarding Heparin)

Heparin, a blood thinner, has been linked to several deaths and hundreds of life-threatening adverse reactions. If you suspect contaminated heparin in the death or sudden and severe onset of adverse reactions during dialysis between September 13, 2007 and May 1, 2008, or, suspect comtaminated heparin may have been used for cardiac surgery or other heparin treatments between approximately February 1, 2007 and May 1, 2008, please give us a call. (Please note that certain hospitals still had recalled lots in their pharmacies after May 1, 2008.)

Greed. It is a prominent topic in American Politics and Business. Corporate America and Wall Street have chosen greed over the interests of the American people.

Lost in the shuffle of the Wall Street catastrophes and Bernie Madoff is the story of heparin. A story that has all of the elements of what is wrong with Corporate America: profits over safety, poor government oversight and corporations taking advantage of what they knew to be poor oversight to ship American jobs to China.

Risk of contamination of the drug supply has been the number one issue facing the FDA and the pharmaceutical industry over the last decade. Still, the number of facilities producing American drugs overseas grew exponentially under the Bush Administration. It grew at such a rate, there was virtually no chance that any of those plants would be inspected by the FDA. That is a huge health risk for all Americans. But for those who received heparin, that risk was far greater.

Heparin is a drug intended to be taken intravenously, by hundreds of thousands of our sickest people: dialysis patients and those having cardiac and other surgeries.

Baxter should have known better than to delegate the safety of such a pharmaceutical to the Chinese. Robert Parkinson, Baxter’s CEO, said as much in sworn testimony to Congress.

He said:

We deeply regret that this has happened, and I feel a strong sense of personal responsibility for these circumstances.
I feel this responsibility because of who we are and what we do as a company. Each day, over 6 million infusions of Baxter products are administered to patients all around the world with life-threatening diseases and conditions. We are not a traditional pharmaceutical company -- we don’t make pills or tablets, we don’t do direct-to-consumer advertising, we don’t make lifestyle drugs – we develop and manufacture products that are injected or infused or inhaled by patients who need them to stay alive.
Because our products are used in critical care environments, they have to be safe and effective every time, and this time they were not. No matter what the reason, this is my responsibility, because Baxter’s name was on the product.

EVERY TIME. How could they be safe, every time if such drugs came from China, where we can’t even assure that dog food or baby formula is safe, or that toys don’t have lead paint on them.

Well this time, the Chinese manufacturing process got a toxin, a poison for some, into an intraveneous drug, intended for our sickest people. Baxter might as well have been recycling contaminated hypodermic needles.

Despite this catastrophe, the Heparin Story has become almost a footnote in the corporate debacle that the Bush administration has left behind. News reports talk of about 50 to 100 deaths. What is not said is that Baxter shipped millions of doses of poison. That poison didn’t kill everyone who got it. Like a bee sting, most people had a mild or insignificant reaction. But like a bee sting some people had catastrophic, allergic reactions, causing death or organ failure.

What we don’t know is whether that poison was as strong as that of a bee sting, a scorpion bite or a snake bite. We don’t know if 1%, 2% or 5% had severe reactions. But we do know that this poisoning was one of the most wide spread in history and that every single death of someone who was taking heparin from September 13, 2008, onward must be investigated.

We are convinced that because heparin was given to people who were otherwise so sick, that there are hundreds, more likely thousands of cases of death or serious injuries that have not been investigated fully. Under-diagnosis is rampant because dialysis and heart patients often have poor outcomes. Until the FDA recall was announced in January of 2008, more than four months after Baxter started shipping the poison, physicians would have had no reason to suspect an anaphylactoid reaction. Thus, cause of death or damage would have been attributed to other seemingly plausible causes.

Further, even now, a year after the recall, ignorance about the anaphylactoid agent in heparin continues. The controversy swirled for a few months, but little is being written about it now. The news cycle has passed, even at a time that the scientists are telling us just how severe this poisoning could have been.

We now have a pretty clear picture as to what a heparin reaction looks like, and not surprisingly, it is very similar to the severe reaction some people have to a bee sting.

If your loved one had these symptoms, then his or her medical records must be fully evaluated to determine if they, too, were a victim of corporate malfeasance.

The automatic symptom is facial edema. That means swelling of

lips,
eyelids,
throat,
tongue
or mouth

This may not be noted in the medical records, but may have been witnessed, even perhaps by family members.

The other highly probable symptom is : hypotension, meaning a rapid drop in blood pressure. This should be noted in the medical records, especially if the patient was being monitored at the time of the heparin administration.

If neither of the two above inclusion symptoms are found, then a combination of two or more of the following would still indicate a probable adverse reaction: