Friday April 16 7:26 PM ET

Calif. Blood Lab Patients Warned In Needle Scare

By Greg Frost

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Thousands of patients who had blood drawn at a California laboratory will be warned to take AIDS and hepatitis tests after a technician at the lab admitted she sometimes reused disposable hypodermic needles, officials said Friday.

Confirming a report in the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper, state health authorities and Anglo-U.S. drug maker SmithKline Beecham said they were mailing warnings to at least 3,600 patients in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties who had blood work performed at a SmithKline clinical lab in Palo Alto, Calif.

SmithKline fired the unidentified technician, or phlebotomist, after a colleague saw her reuse a needle on March 22. During an investigation, the phlebotomist acknowledged reusing certain needles to draw blood from patients with veins that were difficult to access.

The phlebotomist, who worked at the lab since June 1, 1997, said she would wash some used needles with water and hydrogen peroxide -- a mixture that health officials said could kill some, but not all, blood-borne pathogens.

The state department of health, which was investigating the incident along with federal and local health authorities, said the risk to patients of possible infection was ``low'' but not nonexistent.

``Although the risk of infection to anyone who had blood drawn by this phlebotomist is low, reusing needles in any way is unsafe and a breach of standard medical practices,'' California Health Officer James Stratton said in a statement.

State health officials would not discuss the phlebotomist's background but did say she had worked at between five and 10 other sites before she began work at the Palo Alto lab. It was not known when the woman began reusing needles, how often she reused them or if she reused them at any of the other facilities, the officials said.

``In some cases she worked under close supervision, which makes it unlikely she was reusing needles,'' said Lea Brooks, a spokeswoman for the state health department. ``In other cases she wasn't in the direct line of vision of a supervisor.''

SmithKline said the technician's safety lapse was ''shocking,'' and added the company would pay the costs of running blood tests on patients who had work done at the lab.

``As a company whose overriding objective is to improve the health of people everywhere, we are shocked by this apparent disregard for company procedures,'' John Okkerse, president of Philadelphia-based SmithKline Beecham Clinical Laboratories, said in a statement.

``Our first concern is for the health of the patients,'' he said. ``We are working to determine the risk, if any, the patients face and we will do whatever is medically appropriate to support them.''

Okkerse said SmithKline had intended to notify patients and their physicians in advance of ``a public notification,'' but noted that the story had been broken by the media before the company could do so.

SmithKline said letters would be sent to all individuals and their physicians who had blood drawn at the site, and that free follow-up blood tests would be offered to them. The company also said it was establishing a telephone call center to answer patient inquiries.

SmithKline spokesman Jeremy Heymsfeld described the technician as a ``fully certified phlebotomist'' and said there was no acceptable explanation for what she did. ``It was a totally inappropriate action against medical procedure,'' he said.