It seemed over in a second, but it wasn’t.
At Oak Forest Hospital’s laundry room, when Ella Holt had reached for some hospital clothes, her left hand was pricked by a syringe left behind in the dirty garments.
“Oh, my God. I can’t believe this,” the hospital worker recalled shouting at the time.
For months she was haunted by fear she had contracted a serious illness, and her fears lingered as she periodically underwent tests and monitoring. “It really had me upset and worried,” she said.
Though nothing came of her injury six years ago, she is one of thousands of workers who suffer accidental needle sticks yearly and whose lives are shadowed by the threat of contracting a fatal or debilitating illness.
With health-care workers pushing for safer equipment to prevent such accidents, California last fall became the first state to mandate the use of safer needles. Tennessee followed in March, and efforts are under way in another 19 states, including Iowa and Michigan.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which monitors the nation’s workplaces, also is considering what steps it should take.
But Illinois abruptly fell off this bandwagon this week as legislation that had sailed through the House with 117 votes stalled in the Senate.
The sponsor, Sen. Kathleen Parker (R-Northbrook), put the bill on hold, saying there were too many problems with it, such as whether all devices can be converted to qualify as safe. She said the bill may reappear when lawmakers meet again in the fall.
The controversy that blindsided the bill’s sponsors reflects much of the wrangling that has seen workers and needle manufacturers pitted against hospitals and different groups of physicians.
It is a battle between those who point to the dangers and say the technology is available, and others who doubt whether the advances have been made, and even then do not want to be told what to use.
Pushing the legislation is an array of health-care unions, led by the Service Employees International Union and the American Nurses Association.
Opposing them is an amalgam that has included the American Hospital Association, the American Dental Association and pharmaceutical companies concerned that their prefilled equipment will be knocked off the market.
In Illinois, the state Society of Anesthesiology stepped forward to raise its objections to the proposed law.
The goal of safer needles is to reduce health-care workers’ exposure to the points of the devices they use on the job. For syringes, for example, the risk is reduced by retracting the needle’s sharp point, covering it with a sheath, or by blunting it after its use. The technology goes beyond syringes to catheters and blood-drawing equipment.
Although most of this equipment has been on the market for a decade, the usage has been limited. Indeed, safer needles account for less than 10 percent of the syringes and blood-drawing devices used at health-care facilities in the United States, said Janine Jagger, who heads the Health Care Worker Safety Center at the University of Virginia Health Sciences Center in Charlottesville.
In a major government-funded study released in 1997, safe needles reduced the amount of needle sticks by up to 75 percent, according to Jagger.
Out of 4.4 million health-care workers at risk, about 600,000 get injured by needles every year, she estimates. Of them, she figures, as many as 35 contract AIDS, 400 develop hepatitis B and at least 120 are infected with hepatitis C annually.
How much would a shift to safer devices cost?
The typical syringe goes for about 7 cents, and most safer versions cost about 32 cents. A 300-bed hospital, which annually buys more than 200,000 types of needles, would spend at least $75,000 a year for safer devices, according to Becton Dickinson, the nation’s major needle manufacturer, in Franklin Lakes, N.J.
That would be a fivefold increase, but these are costs that hospitals and insurers should be willing to bear, say the backers of safer needles.
“The industry is using technology that is 40 years old and is inherently dangerous and obsolete,” said Bill Borwegan, head of occupational health and safety for the service workers union, which has spent much energy nationwide on the issue.
The American Hospital Association says, however, that the answer is not to pass laws, but to let the health-care industry resolve the problem on its own, though opponents say that voluntary efforts have barely made a difference.
Cost is not the major issue, explained Jack Lord, chief operating officer of the Chicago-based hospital organization. Rather, he said that his group’s major concern is protecting patients. But he could not point to any evidence of the increased danger for patients from the safety devices.
The Chicago-based American Dental Association points to two studies, which show problems encountered by dentists using safe needles. One study indicated that safe needles were more cumbersome for dentists to use and increased the number of injuries, said Dr. Dan Meyer of the dentists group.
The anesthesiologists’ complaint is that the technology is not advanced enough, and in some cases not the best choice for anesthesiologists facing life-or-death situations with patients, said Zale Glauberman, a Springfield lobbyist for the anesthesiologists.
Despite such resistance, executives at Becton Dickinson predict that safer needles will one day prevail and say they have long taken this view.
“We see clearly that what we have been doing with limited success is about to become a very important new business for us,” said Camilla Jenkins, a spokeswoman for the company, which reported that 30 percent of its revenues last year came from the sale of safe needles.
But Kevin Burke is dubious about Becton Dickinson’s commitment to safer needles.
The Chicago attorney represented a worker at Chicago Osteopathic Hospital who was stuck by a traditional syringe that he was putting in a disposal unit when cleaning up a surgical area. Within six months, the worker tested positive for the AIDS virus.
Burke said he reached a $345,000 settlement in 1995 with Becton Dickinson, a $250,000 settlement with Baxter Health Care Corp., maker of the disposal unit, and settled with the hospital for $20,000.
Ella Holt has no doubt about safer needles.
After her needle stick, she was treated with medication to ward off any serious diseases, and the medication sickened her for weeks at a time. “The doctors said, `You may be allergic or you may have side effects,’ ” she recalled.
That’s what made her so frustrated.
“I felt that I shouldn’t have had the shot in the first place if they had safe needles.”
