Articles - Ronald Modra´s Legacy

Serial Killers In Hospitals: How Safe Is Your Hospital

Iatrogenesis - polyfarmaco - Staph Infections - Wrong Diagnosis - Wrong Treatment and Murder!

By RMR

Can these things really happen in hospital and with what regularity do they happen. You may never have even thought that these considerations were important & certainly nobody ever suggested that it could possibly happen to you, although we are starting to hear more & more about staph infections that strike while you are in hospital, considerably increasing your stay& in some cases causing death. In many hospitals infections are more common than others so it would be nice if our government had an office that kept accurate and transparent records which would allow us to know exactly which hospitals are the safest. However, this is not likely to happen in the near future unless some big changes take place.

In the USA, UK and Europe, we can get some information about these things. It is becoming quite obvious that this area of unexpected complications is in fact, quite common.

The records often do not show what is really happening within the walls of the institution. Most death certificates are quite normal looking and sometimes perhaps more often than we realize, the certificate does not give the true cause of death.
Pp: The cause of death is due to a doctor´s error, e.g. misdiagnosis, wrong treatment, a mistake in any procedure, the cause is really “iatrogenic”, which means it could or should have been avoided. Sometimes it could be due to neglect of the patients basic needs or by giving a basic drug many times instead of just once, etc, etc. Because hospitals and doctors “do not make such serious mistakes!” It is unlikely that it will ever be accepted in the mind-set of the staff that the patient was killed by “iatrogenesis.” The death certificate will usually bear the name of whatever the victim was originally diagnosed for, with little regard for what has eventuated since admission. Iatrogenesis therefore complicates being treated where drugs, surgery or radiation are being used, because even by “correct” application, according to directions obtained from the manufacturer or surgeon. There is a long history of failures in almost every procedure. These are not fully illuminated to the public nor the medical student. Instead the success rates are isolated & studied as though they were a separate issue. In this environment failure is accepted as inevitable & beyond the control of any human element, and rarely investigated. It is usually thought that it was one of those unusual cases that could not be helped, but a careful study of the statistics shows that these “unusual cases” are extremely common, and in many cases represent the majority of outcomes.

Polyfarmaco is a word that has become the norm to describe too many drugs given at the same time. In areas where it is easy to get assistance for drug treatments or where there is a drug-store on every corner, is it possible to find a high incidence of Polyfarmaco victims. These are people who take multiples of drugs and really believe that they would immediately deteriorate & die if they discontinued any one of them. It is of course addiction, in a form more severe than opium (cocaine is more common) or heroin, etc. Simply because the victim is not allowed to realize that he or she is entering a dead-end road from which the return journey is usually in a wheel-chair or a coffin. Ignorance is not a way out but often a Polyfarmacy is the addiction to a variety of drugs, each carrying a side effect which must be treated with an additional drug & the chain is unbroken unless the victim realizes the name of the road. You never succeed in curing all the secondary symptoms of all the drugs, no matter how many you take.

“This one will work, if is the latest breakthrough in medicine, etc, etc.,” But if rarely does, & you have become even more addicted.
It has been often repeated by researchers that the chemicals which we receive in our medicines, foods and water are the prime cause of many modern sickness, including diabetes, heart disease, cancer, stroke & most of those things which are on the increase wherever we have sophisticated societies, eating sophisticated diets, filled with sophisticated additives.

Staph Infections have been common in hospitals all over the world, wherever there are modern drugs & surgical procedures, but as sophisticated drug treatments increase and surgical operations too, the increase of Staph infections keeps increasing.

In the last few years it has increased alarmingly and over a period of almost 5 years it has doubled. That means that you and I are twice as likely to get a hospital infection that we did not have before being admitted. Many observers believe that it is dirty conditions and lack of hygiene that contributes to this modern problem. It is wise to take into consideration that hospital diets and those of the average person today may be more responsible than any other single factor. We always hear about powerful new germs, but we don´t hear very much about weakened cells that have become so toxic and weak that they can no longer sustain life or fight infections. If we are not nourished enough to repair our own cells continually the body must deteriorate. I have never seen a persona with a depletion of drugs necessary for a healthy life but everywhere it can be clearly seen that people lack proper nutrition to prevent the symptoms of disease as their cells break down & become the prey of viruses & bacteria which feed or evolve in the presence of weak cells. They also fall prey to the drugs which are introduced after cells break down.

If only our cells could talk do you think they would be calling for drugs or for nutrition? To the sensitive person who is tuned into his-her bodies needs, the cells do indeed talk, and they thank you when you heed their call.

We rely too much our experts peering at us over thick glasses and red noses and that tells us very clearly that something is very wrong with the health of the health expert. Time to run, when you see such obvious signs that you have entered the wrong door.

It´s amazing that with all the hazards in life we should need to read about murderers stalking the halls of our hospitals and old folk´s homes. History is crammed with hidden cases. This is something that many of us just refuse to believe, even after reading such accounts in our newspapers, hearing their names of the details of their sentences handed down by the courts, yet it is obvious that only a few get caught.

It may even find it more unbelievable that in the USA alone there have been more than 20 reported cases, each ranging from a few victims to 200 or more victims in the past decade or two, but until recently very little publicity. It seems that iatrogenics, polyfarmacy and these murders, using drugs and unsupervised nights in the hospital ward is just too complicated to explain to the public.

Maybe we wouldn´t understand or is it that it would be bad for business. For some reason it is not talked about and very little action taken.
When we reported in # 15 from El Guardian de la Salud that Dr. Shipman had shocked everyone by dispatching over 200 people with overdoses of drugs there was a shocked silence. People read it without comment. Then Dr. Patel #16, With over 80 cases and the courts were forced to get involved when the state health ministery of old Australia was summoned to do something about it. Nobody wants to admit or believe that such monsters masquerade as doctors and nurses so normally it just “didn´t happen”, but suddenly it is also starting to become more visible system of eliminating such people from the places of trust where they can operate invisibly is now imperative. Trust alone is not enough and every act by healthcare givers must be absolutely transparent. All deaths must be treated as serious occurrences with correct checks and balances in place to avoid blind spots where suspicious acts could take place.

Nobody wants to believe that going to hospital is the most dangerous thing that can happen to you
However, the statistics say that the more modern, sophisticated and large our health systems become, the more sickness we will have. Quite the opposite of what the average person may expect. More doctors, more drugs, bigger facilities mean more sickness, and more suspicious acts. So what comes first the sickness or the facility to treat sickness? Is the sickness of the people causing a more and bigger sickness industry? Is the sickness industry creating it´s needed victims by a very sophisticated and complex marketing system which is invisible to most of us?

Whatever is the real reason must be investigated but the thing that cannot be tolerated is murderers who can stalk the hospitals for many years, murdering at will without being caught.

Donald Harvey was born in Ohio 1952 & grew up looking like a very normal person. During an evening shift at Marymount Hospital in Kentucky USA, Donald Harvey committed his first murder. Harvey described the incident to a reporter. “I went into a room to check on a stroke victim & and he rubbed feces in my face. The next thing I knew I had smothered him. I lost control, it was the last straw, I was trying to help and he does that to me.”

Following the murder, Harvey cleaned up the patient, and hopped into the shower before notifying other nurses. “No one ever questioned it”, he said. Three weeks later he killed again by disconnecting an oxygen tank at an elderly woman´s bedside. He then became more confident using plastic bags, morphine and several other drugs to kill many more patients in that first year. One patient had an argument with Harvey and hit him over the head with a bed-pan. Harvey said he was knocked out by the blow, so waited till later in the night and stuck a sharp instrument into the patient´s catheter. Infection set in and the man died a few days later. Amazingly, over the years he amassed 30 pounds of cyanide which he had slowly stolen while working on night shifts at V.A. Medical Hospital Cincinnati, Ohio.

Harvey confessed to 33 murders, but though that there were many others that he could not recall. Harvey´s first scheduled parole hearing is set for 2047. He will be 95. Harvey´s killing spree went on for 17 years until he was caught in 1987.

Serial killer nurse Charles Cullen admitted killing 40 patients and was received 11 consecutive life terms, making ineligible for parole for nearly 400 years.

After his arrest in December 2003, he confessed to killing over an 18 year period in many different hospitals in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
The precise number of people Cullen killed may never be known due to inadequate hospital records and his own confusion in being able to recall all of the victims. Unlike Harvey, Cullen did not keep a detailed diary.

Families of the victims have filed lawsuits against many of the facilities where Cullen worked, arguing that they failed to check his background and didn´t follow up on warning signs.

In 1983 Dr. Michael Swango graduated from Southern Illinois School of Medicine in Springfield, although he was a year behind his classmates for failure to complete assignments. He served his internship at Ohio State University, but when his post was finished, it was not extended -partly because of suspicious that no one wanted to talk about. After he left, authorities investigated him for murder, but discovered that it´s not easy to pin a murder on someone giving injections to patients when that´s what doctors do.

Dr. Swango later fell out of favor with a team of paramedics he was working with and tried to poison them. He did 3 years in jail for this.
Despite his record he was accepted into other healing positions in Virginia, South Dakota, New York, and Zimbabwe. He had lied, faked his credentials, adopted aliases. No one checked his past employment history and wherever he worked, colleagues became ill and patients died. Each time authorities became interested after complaints but he had moved on.

When Swango was finally caught by the FBI he had been active for almost 20 years in 7 different hospitals. In many cases patients identified him as the one with the syringe and those who survived said that they lost the ability to feel and more after he injected them.

In 1998 he was charged with killing 5 patients in a Zimbabwe Hospital.

Taken into custody on July 17 2000, he confessed in September to fatally poisoning several patients and was convicted of another murder also. The extent of his activities may never be known, and he has been sentenced to life in prison without parole.

There have been hundreds of cases similar or worse by both male and female nurses and doctors, but the most recent cases are easier to study.

One thing that it is crystal clear is the reluctance by authorities to admit that this is happening and even worse, the cover-ups that make it possible for the killings to continue. In more than one instance we can see that the perpetrators have been assisted to escape or avoid punishment. In many cases the doctor or nurse is addicted to drugs themselves, and this is not so surprising when access to those drugs is so easy and there is no cost, other than manipulating the records of usage.

SUMMARY

KILLERS IN THE HOSPITAL SYSTEM

People make mistakes, and in hospitals where scientific theories must change as every new breakthrough brings with it a new theory there is constant review of what works and what doesn´t. The margin for error is built into an ever changing medical world.
There is no sign that this uncertainty about the latest theory or break through will ever change, because for every door that science opens there are many more that science cannot open. However we do have a little more control over murders in the ward, taking advantage of available toxins stored on the premises.

In almost every case which I researched in order to prepare this article, there was evidence that the hospital had been warned that the person was a suspect in previous events. There was evidence & sometimes open admission that the suspect was protected by both workmates and by hospital management, in fact protection by superiors often supplied the first motive for continued killings and such a long career of damage before being caught.

It is unfortunately a fact of bureaucracy that administrators will hide whatever makes their agency or company look bad to the public in order to keep the revenue flowing in.

The paramount issue with hospitals is trust: If patients don´t feel safe going to a particular facility, they´ll choose another, and that is to be avoided at all cost.

Around the world healthcare serial killers are becoming more prominent. They now have a reference HCSKS and despite some media attention the crimes continue.

July 2002, Vickie Dawn Jackson, 36, of Texas, was suspected of twenty five deaths. Her trial was October 2004 after 10 bodies were exhumed to run tests.

Christine Malevre, France, charged with the murder of 7 patients, but at one time said she had assisted 30 patients to die. She received a 10 year prison term.

Lucy Quirina de Berk, Holland, was described by prosecuters as a sociopath. She was a former prostitute, had admitted falsifying her school diploma & was suspected of drug addiction. In March 2003 she was convicted & given a life sentence.

Kristen Gilbert, 33, came to justice in 1996 when 3 nurses reported their fear that there was a killer in ward C of the Veterans Affairs Medical Centre in Northampton, Massachusetts. Epinephrine was being stolen. Nurse Kathy Rix had suspected the problem and counted the epinephrine bottles one afternoon. Then there was a cardiac emergency, and she went back to see if the bottles were still there. All had disappeared.

1993, before Orville Lynn Majors joined the nursing staff at Vermillion County Hospital in Clinton, Indiana, everything seemed normal. About 26 people died each year in the intensive care ward.

In 1994 the average jumped to 101 with most of them being on Major´s shifts.

In 1995 after Majors was suspended the numbers returned to average. Major´s was suspected in 130 deaths and 15 bodies were exhumed to determine how they died. Police found the evidence that Majors had administered epinephrine and potassium chloride even though he was never authorized to give injections. He received a life sentence. “Senior citizens should be gassed” he was reported saying.

There are many others in similar circumstances and also many who were suspected but never able to be properly investigated and so remain un-solved in many countries all over the world.

Those people who are in a position to protect the public should study the following references to get some idea of how big the problem is. This is only the beginning, if no action is taken to develop “red light” markers so that no persons can operate for 20 years or more without being discovered.

The following are simple guidelines that should be followed in all hospitals and wherever the potential exists for HCSKS (Healthcare Serial Killers)

·Statistically there is a higher death rate when the suspected person is on shift.
·The suspected deaths were unexpected.
·The death symptoms were also not expected, given the patient´s illness or procedure.
·The suspected person is always available to help.
·He or she is often the last one seen with the patient before death.
·The suspected person moves around from one facility to another.
·Other staff members give that person nicknames like “Death Angel”.
·The person is overtly interested in the death.
·Other patients have complained about treatment from them.
·The person is secretive or has a difficult time with personal relationships.
·The person has a history of mental instability, depression or drug taking.

Documenting patterns of behavior may help in finding physical evidence that links with the crime. Unfortunately, intentional killers, as well as people who become addicted to killing after starting out with a mercy killing or two, have the perfect arena in which to operate for long periods of time. Hospitals are places of trust and the means to kill patients is really available. Medical murderers are not easily detected, especially doctors, so detecting this phenomenon requires a sharp eye and the awareness that any care facility is vulnerable. Suspicious people must be taken seriously, and vigilance at all times. It has to become common practice in some areas to allow a patient advocate or carer to be present, knowing that this will be the only way to prevent the preventable.-