350 - Book Club: A Meningitis Outbreak from Pharmaceutical Compounding
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 26 July 2021
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dr. Joshua Sharfstein speaks to Jason Dearen, author of the book Kill Shot: A Shadow Industry, A Deadly Disease. The book covers the nationwide meningitis outbreak caused by the New England Compounding Center, which sold medications contaminated with mold and fungi for injection into joints, the spine, and other sterile spaces. They discussed what led to this catastrophe, the legislation that passed in its aftermath, and the future of oversight in this area.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Season 4 of Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. |
| 0:13.0 | I'm Josh Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former Commissioner of Health in Baltimore City. |
| 0:20.0 | Our goal is to bring |
| 0:21.7 | scientific evidence and experience to current topics in public health through engaging interviews |
| 0:27.1 | with scientists, community leaders, policy experts, public health officials, clinicians, and more. |
| 0:32.8 | If you have ideas or questions for us to cover, please email us at public health question at jhhhu.edu. |
| 0:40.4 | That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:47.0 | Today, it's a great episode of the Public Health On Call Book Club. |
| 0:51.1 | I speak to Jason Deeran about his recent book on the outbreak of fungal meningitis |
| 0:57.3 | traced to a compounding pharmacy in 2012. The book is called Killshot, a shadow industry, a deadly |
| 1:05.1 | disease. Let's listen. Jason Deeran, thank you so much for joining Public Health on call to talk about your latest |
| 1:14.1 | book. |
| 1:15.1 | Can you take us back to 2012 when the events you describe started? |
| 1:20.6 | Sure. |
| 1:21.6 | Well, thank you for having me. |
| 1:23.1 | So in 2012 in Tennessee, there were a number of patients who began showing up at Vanderbilt Medical Center with a form of meningitis that doctors couldn't figure out. |
| 1:34.5 | It was kind of a mysterious meningitis. |
| 1:37.5 | And what were the symptoms the patients had? |
| 1:40.5 | Some of them, they had dizziness, stiff neck, but then some of the patients even more mysteriously began experiencing these very destructive strokes. |
| 1:52.0 | So patients with an unknown disease, very serious consequences, and then Vanderbilt didn't know why it was happening. |
| 2:00.7 | What did they do to get the answer? |
| 2:02.6 | So the doctor who figured out that the meningitis was being caused by a rare fungus, |
... |
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