SAN GABRIEL VALLEY TRIBUNE

Transcription

SAN
GABRIEL
VALLEY
TRIBUNE
Thursday, August 20, 2015
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HEALTH
Outbreak under investigation
Huntington Memorial Hospital quarantines Olympus endoscopes
Online: What is Pseudomonas? SGVTRIBUNE.COM.
By Jason Henry
jason.henry@langnews.com
@JasonMHenry on Twitter
Huntington Memorial Hospital is investigating a
connection between infected patients and medical scopes produced by a company tied to superbug outbreaks at UCLA and
Cedar-Sinai’s medical centers earPASADENA »
lier this year.
The hospital Wednesday said
it has quarantined endoscopes
manufactured by Olympus after patients contracted bacterial
infections following procedures
that utilized the instruments.
“The link between this bacte-
The
Huntington
Memorial
Hospital in
Pasadena said
Wednesday
that it has
quarantined
endoscopes
manufactured
by Olympus.
ria, Pseudomonas, which is a community-acquired bacteria found
prevalently outside the hospital
setting, has not yet been traced to
a scope,” said Paula Verrette, senior vice president and chief medical officer for quality and physician services, in a statement. “We
are still investigating the potential link and have engaged two na-
STAFF FILE PHOTO
HOSPITAL » PAGE 5
DROUGHT
IT’S IN THE PIPELINE
WEST COVINA
City asks
DA to
review
audit
Criminal charges may
be filed over fiscal
mismanagement
By Stephanie K. Baer
stephanie.baer@langnews.com
@skbaer on Twitter
LEO JARZOMB — STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
Officials show off the purple pipe, which indicates recycled water, to open the recycled-water flow during Rose Hills Memorial Park’s
groundbreaking ceremony for the final phase of the project at the 700-acre cemetery on Wednesday.
Rose Hills: At 700 acres, cemetery to become the largest recycled water site in the nation
Conservation: Change planned by end of year to save enough water for 2,000 to 3,000 homes
Online: Read previous
coverage on the drought.
By Steve Scauzillo
steve.scauzillo@langnews.com
@stevscaz on Twitter
SGVTRIBUNE.COM
WHITTIER » Half a million people rest eternally under 700
acres of Rose Hills Memorial
Park, the largest cemetery in the
United States. Just keeping the
grass green — a business prior-
ity — once required 293 million
gallons of potable water a year,
as much used in several cities.
On Wednesday, the cemetery
put an end to irrigating lawns
with drinking water. Thanks to
a change in state law prompted
by the drought, Rose Hills will
use 100 percent recycled water
on its sprawling grounds and
in decorative fountains by the
end of the year, saving enough
drinking water for 2,000 to
3,000 homes.
The all-recycling effort began
23 years ago, when the cemetery
signed an agreement with the
nearby Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts to bring waste
water treated to advanced levels up the hill in a separate delivery system of “purple pipes.”
In the past decade, the meandering cemetery along the base of
the Puente Hills pushed ahead
WATER » PAGE 5
WEST COVINA » The City Council
voted Tuesday to send a state audit that found “serious and pervasive deficiencies” in the city’s administrative and accounting practices to the Los Angeles County
District Attorney’s Office.
After discussing the document
from the State Controller’s Office for the first time, the council voted unanimously to give it
to the District Attorney’s Office to
decide whether criminal charges
are warranted as a result of numerous instances of fiscal and
administrative mismanagement
outlined in the report released
last month.
The council also voted to schedule a special meeting to discuss
the audit with the public.
“Overall, I was sorely disappointed in our staff and our council ... and, at the same time, hopeful because we’ve changed a lot of
it already,” said Councilman Mike
Spence.
The audit, which was requested
by the current City Council and
AUDIT » PAGE 5
Online: For previous coverage of the audit, go to our
website. SGVTRIBUNE.COM.
INTERNET
PERSONAL FINANCE
SANTA FE SPRINGS
DINING OUT
Hackers expose millions
on cheating website
Bunny Museum one of
area’s unusual ventures
Worker attacked with
‘caustic chemical’
Go meatless, not
hungry at Happy Family
Hackers posted what they said
were personal details of people
registered with cheating website Ashley Madison. PAGE A7
Located in a Pasadena home,
the museum features thousands of bunny-related items,
some of which are rare. PAGE A13
A caseworker suffered burns
to her arms after two attackers threw an unknown chemical on her. PAGE A6
All-you-can-eat vegetarian
food and more at Happy Family in Monterey Park.
INDEX
Lottery ............A2
Local ................A3
Obituaries .......A5
Opinion ............A9
Puzzles .......... A10
Comics ........... A11
Classifieds .......C1
HTTP://BIT.LY/HAPPYFAMILY
7
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4
THURSDAY, AUGUST 20, 2015
AROUND THE
VALLEY
WEST COVINA
Fashion show, lunch
scheduled
Queen of the Valley
Hospital volunteers are
hosting their annual Second-Hand Rose Fashion
Show and luncheon from
11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Sept. 12
in the hospital’s Oakwood
Room, 1115 S. Sunset Ave.,
West Covina.
Tickets are $25 each
and include lunch. They
can be purchased at the
hospital gift shop and at
the door. Reservations required by Sept. 8.
For more information,
contact Lucie at 626-3387279 or Bonnie at 626919-6314.
ARCADIA
Coin show
returning to area
One of the area’s largest coin and collectible
shows will return to Arcadia during the 26th annual Golden State Coin
Show, held Saturday and
Sunday at the Arcadia
Masonic Center, 50 W.
Duarte Road, Arcadia.
It is sponsored by the
Numismatic Association
of Southern California.
The show is open 10 a.m.
to 6 p.m. Saturday and
10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday.
Parking is free and admission is $4 for adults,
free with a new NASC
membership or for youth
age 16 and younger with
an adult.
For more information and to RSVP for the
workshop, contact Walt
Ostromecki at ostromecki@money.org.
BALDWIN PARK
Hazardous waste,
E-waste roundup set
The public is invited
to dump their waste at a
free Household Hazardous Waste and Electronic
Roundup from 9 a.m. to
3 p.m. Saturday at Morgan Park, 4100 Baldwin
Park Blvd.
The event is open to
Los Angeles County residents, business waste will
not be accepted.
Turn in batteries, auto
fluids, paint, fertilizers,
expired medicine, fluorescent light bulbs and electronic equipment at the
event. Items not accepted
include tires, trash, explosives, ammunition or major appliances.
There is a 15 gallon
or 125-pound limit per
trip. Materials should not
be mixed together and
brought in a non-returnable sturdy box in the
trunk of a car.
call 888-253-2652 or go to
www.lacsd.org.
SAN DIMAS
Book sale to
benefit library
The Friends of the San
Dimas Library will be
holding its annual book
sale Oct. 2-4 at the library meeting room, 145
N. Walnut Ave., San Dimas.
This event coincides
with the San Dimas
Western Days.
The sale will be open
from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Oct. 2-3, and from 11 a.m.
to 3 p.m. Oct. 4. Bring
your own reusable bags.
No bags will be provided
Oct. 2-3. Paper bags will
be provided Oct. 4 for
Buck-A-Bag Day, during
which a bag of books will
be $1.
Proceeds benefit the
San Dimas Library.
call 909-599-6738.
LA PUENTE
Solis to pass out
school supplies
Supervisor Hilda Solis will handout backpacks filled with school
supplies to low-income
students today in La Puente.
At 9:15 a.m., Solis
is scheduled to present New Horizons Caregivers Group, at 3308
Budleigh Drive, a Hacienda Heights-based nonprofit that helps low-income families from the
Hacienda La Puente
Unified School District,
a $50,000 check and
hand out 100 backpacks
to students at California
Elementary School.
— Staff reports
SAN GABRIEL VALLEY TRIBUNE » SGVTRIBUNE.COM
FROM PAGE 1
Assemblyman Roger Hernandez, D-West Covina, last
year, found the city misused
taxpayer money, violated
state public contracting
laws and inappropriately
hired former City Manager
Chris Chung and other employees. The audit covered
Hospital
FROM PAGE 1
tionally renowned medical
research facilities for assistance.”
Huntington declined
to say how many patients
were affected, or if the bacteria resisted treatment. Experts say it’s too early to tell
if the Pseudomonas strain
is resistant enough to classify as a “superbug,” a type
of bacteria that is immune
antibiotics.
The hospital alerted patients and health officials
upon learning of the bacterial growth, according to
Verrette. Hospitals officials
did not say when the infections were discovered.
“This is a problem facing every hospital and we
will be part of the solution,” she said. “We cannon
deprive appropriate care to
patients whose health issues can be relieved or addressed through the use of
these scopes, but we are
proceeding with an abundance of caution in our disinfecting and monitoring
protocols to ensure patient
safety.”
Olympus came under
fire earlier this year when
endoscopes it began selling
in 2010 without FDA approval were tied to infections across Southern California.
The hard-to-clean devices were believed responsible for the infections of
seven people, two of whom
died.
All of the patients contracted an antibiotic-resistant strain of bacteria after
undergoing endoscopic procedures similar to the ones
used at Huntington Hospital. Two devices used at the
Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center had “embedded”
infections on the devices.
The FDA on Monday accused Olympus, based in Japan, of failing to properly
report 16 patients who contracted Pseudomonas after undergoing endoscopic
procedures using the firm’s
devices. The FDA requires
such reports within 30
days, but Olympus did not
report the incidents until
2015, three years after becoming aware of the problems.
The bacteria found at
Huntington Hospital differs from the infections previously found at UCLA and
Cedar Sinai. At those hospitals, doctors found a “superbug” called CRE, or car-
|5
Authorities ID man
who died after arrest
FROM PAGE 1
Audit
A
BALDWIN PARK
Water
and will go from using 60
percent reclaimed water to
100 percent after construction is completed on the final phase located within
the cemetery’s original,
101-year-old section.
The latest phase — about
30 percent of the memorial
park’s footprint — will cost
$1 million, paid for in part
by grants from the Metropolitan Water District of
Southern California.
“It is a better use of resources to help and assist
cemeteries to use 100 percent reclaimed water,” summarized Kent Woods, senior
managing director of Service Corporation International, the publicly-traded
parent company and owner
of several other cemeteries
in Southern California.
The vast burial ground
and mortuary contains the
largest concentration of
pipes delivering recycled water in the nation, said Shane
Chapman, general manager
of the Monrovia-based Upper San Gabriel Valley Municipal Water District, the
agency that is helping them
reach that milestone.
Building a separate system of purple pipes took
time and money. But when
it came to the last 400 acres
of the 1,400-acre cemetery,
existing burial plots dating
back to 1913 and one of the
| OBITUARIES
By Ruby Gonzales
ruby.gonzales@langnews.com
@RubyGonzales2 on Twitter
The Coroner’s Office on Wednesday released the name of
the man who died after he
was Tased and handcuffed
by Baldwin Park police.
The cause of death for
44-year-old Oscar Ruiz has
not been determined yet.
Ed Winter, spokesman for
the Los Angeles County
Department of Medical
Examiner-Coroner, said an
autopsy hasn’t been scheduled.
Winter didn’t have a city
of residence for Ruiz.
Ruiz died later at a local hospital after the Saturday encounter with police at a credit union parking lot in the 12700 block
of Schabarum Avenue in
Irwindale.
It began across the
street in Baldwin Park
at about 3:30 p.m. when
someone saw Ruiz lying
on a sidewalk next to the
Mobil station in the 12600
block of Ramona Boulevard. The passerby called
police.
Officers didn’t find Ruiz
on the sidewalk and were
told that he stole a flagpole
with a flag and swung it
BALDWIN PARK »
LEO JARZOMB — STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
Whittier Mayor Fernando Dutra speaks during Rose Hills
Memorial Park’s ground-breaking ceremony for the final
phase of its recycled water project on Wednesday.
at people
and cars,
a ccord in g
to John Corina of the
Sher if f ’s
Ho m i c i d e
Bureau.
He said
Oscar Ruiz
the police
saw Ruiz at the credit
union parking lot with
the flagpole. He ran from
officers.
It was during the chase
that one officer tried to
subdue Ruiz with Taser,
according to Corina. He
said the officer wasn’t sure
if the Taser hit Ruiz.
There was a struggle
between Ruiz and the officers. He was held down
and handcuffed.
Corina said Ruiz continued to struggle after being
handcuffed then became
unresponsive. Officers removed the handcuffs and
performed CPR on the
44-year-old.
Ruiz’s son, Oscar Ruiz
Jr., said his father had
problems, but was not a
violent man.
“My dad was an addict,
but he didn’t have a violent
bone in his body,” the son
said in an email. “He was
a good soul who was lost
in life.”
oldest mausoleums in California made it next to impossible to re-plumb for reclaimed water.
Instead, Assemblyman
Jimmy Gomez wrote a bill
signed by Gov. Jerry Brown
in 2013 that allowed cemeteries to use existing irrigation pipes, sprinklers
and hose bibs to carry the
highly treated reclaimed
water. Signs must warn the
public that reclaimed water
from the hose bibs is not for
drinking.
Bruce Lazenby, executive director of business
development at Rose Hills,
pushed for the legislation
for 10 years, eventually
opening new ground for recycled water. He’s been invited by the California Department of Consumer Affairs to share the Rose Hills
model with other cemeteries in the state attempting
to meet the governor’s mandatory 25 percent water cutback.
Woods said some of the
Forest Lawn cemeteries
are using reclaimed water.
Also, one of SCI’s properties, Valley Oaks in Thousand Oaks, has converted to
100 percent recycled water.
“I hope this model is established now,” Lazenby
said. “We are trying to do
good public policy. Using
drinking water for watering
golf courses and cemeteries
is a waste of resources.”
Woods said as the cemetery expands in the newer
section near Gate 1, that includes extending reclaimed
water pipes for irrigation.
“This system will be
available for all those future droughts,” said Ann
Terese Heil, monitoring section head for the Sanitation
Districts.
the 2011-12 and 2012-13 fiscal years.
Interim City Manager
Tom Mauk called the audit “important” and “troubling,” noting several areas
where policies were not followed or nonexistent. He
noted the city has already
begun developing new policies and procedures to prevent the same mishaps from
occurring again.
Since January, vacan-
cies in the finance and human resources departments
were filled and the City
Council has begun the process to end the evergreen
component of the city’s
street sweeping contract,
which, the audit found, was
awarded against city code.
Still, several council
members said the city could
do a better job of communicating the city’s progress to
the public.
“It’s not good enough
just to say we’re working
on it,” said Councilman
Corey Warshaw, who suggested that the city schedule the public meeting to
outline the actions the city
has taken to address the issues.
The city plans to hire a
court recorder for the meeting so that the public’s comments can be formally submitted as evidence to the
District Attorney’s Office.
In a separate motion, the
council voted to look into
whether the city should establish some sort of audit or
oversight committee that
would monitor the city’s internal auditing or budgeting processes.
“None of us are trained
enough to be experts in all
of these fields and so additional help I think is a good
thing,” Warshaw said.
bapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae. The family
of germs is sometimes contracted in hospitals from a
common bacteria in human
bodies.
At Huntington Hospital, doctors instead discovered Pseudomonas, a bacteria with similar resistant
properties, according to the
CDC.
Pseudomonas comes
in different strains, with
a wide variation in resistance, according to Dr. Susan Huang, a professor and
medical director of infection prevention at UC Irvine Health.
“This particular bacteria, while it’s not rare, it’s
not super common either,”
Huang said.
The fact that Huntington Hospital discovered
the bacteria might suggest
it is a “superbug,” as doctors
tend to notice Pseudomonas
when it presents as an “unusual strain” or with increased frequency, she said.
Endoscopes, when not
properly cleaned, can carry
bacteria from one patient to
another, Huang noted.
The wire-like devices,
which doc tors sna ke
through the body, present
a problem for medical providers. While endoscopes
save lives by eliminating
the need for riskier procedures or surgeries, the devices add a chance of infection.
The tiny mechanisms
used in the endoscopic procedures require thorough
cleaning — sometimes an
impossibility because of the
construction — to remove
all of the bacteria.
The cost of the device, typically more than
$30,000, means hospitals
can’t afford to discard it
post-procedure, Huang
said. Until a technological
advancement makes endoscopes easier to clean, little
can be done to completely
prevent infections, she said.
“This is consuming days
and days of enormous
amounts of experts’ time
to try to figure out: how
can we solve this problem?”
Huang said. “We’re operating under the assumption
that these devices can not
uniformly be 100 percent
clean between the procedures. That’s extremely un-
settling for us,”
Hu nt i n g t on Ho s pi tal will need to study the
DNA of the bacteria to determine if it came from
another patient, said Dr.
James McKinnell, an infectious disease specialist
with the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute. McKinnell is part of
SHIELD OC, a taskforce
set up by the CDC and state
health department that is
working to reduce CRE infections in Orange County.
“This is a bit of a crime
scene sort of investigation,” McKinnell said. “It’s
the DNA analysis here that
is the valuable link, if you
will.”
CRE and the carbapenem-resistant strain of
Pseudomonas, which he
classified as “more aggressive,” have a 30 to 50 percent mortality rate, he said.
“I think through all of
the attention, we’re learning that we have to be more
aggressive about this,” he
said. The recent outbreaks
may pressure the FDA to develop better guidelines for
endoscopes, he said.
Hospitals must watch
for infections following
endoscopic procedures,
something McKinnell applauded Huntington for doing. UCLA’s research on the
topic has brought it to the
nation’s attention, he said.
“Now that they’re looking for it, they’re finding
it,” he said. ”You’re seeing
science in action.”
OBITUARIES
AND FUNERAL ANNOUNCEMENTS
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Plots & Crypts For Sale
ROSE HILLS (2) plots
Juniper Lawn Lot 5215
$8,000 for both.
Will pay transfer fee 626-443-4533
ROSE HILLS Memorial Park
(1) plot National Shrine Lawn
Grave 3 lot 2829 $2,500
or best offer 702-759-5121
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A
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