Children's Hospital comes clean about chronic mold problems
SEATTLE — When the third child in three months developed a mold infection after heart surgery, Seattle Children’s Hospital executives launched an investigation they hoped would be a model for others to follow.
In the spring of 2005, they formed an outbreak response team to pinpoint the source of the infections, reviewed medical charts, swabbed equipment for contaminants and took air samples in operating rooms. They found small amounts of the Aspergillus fungus in and near an operating room but concluded they were “unlikely to have caused infection.” The main suspect: a dirty nitrogen tank, near an operating room, contaminated with mold.
Children’s was so confident that it published the investigation in a journal in 2007 and presented it at a hospital conference. Separately, the hospital fought a nearly three-year court battle opposing claims that its air-handling system caused a 12-year-old girl’s Aspergillus infection.
Last week, in the wake of a recent spate of Aspergillus infections, Children’s Chief Executive Jeff Sperring announced a stunning reversal: Hospital staff now believe the system that circulates air through operating rooms caused mold infections going back to 2001.
That wasn’t the hospital’s only abrupt shift. Shaken by the revelation that at least 14 patients have been sickened and six have died of Aspergillosis, Children’s announced it would install air filters long known to be effective in blocking tiny particles. Sperring said the hospital was moving to “the highest level of filtration found in operating rooms today.” Children’s has closed 10 of its 14 operating rooms until the custom-built filtration systems can be installed.
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