Fungal meningitis victim hopes Congress hears

Margaret Snopkowski was supposed to be in the delivery room on Oct. 24, when her first grandchild, Ethan Edward Jackson, made his debut in Pittsburgh.

Instead, the 51-year-old Fowlerville, Mich., woman was nearly 300 miles away, lying in a hospital room in Ann Arbor, so sick with fungal meningitis that she was barely aware when the baby boy was born.

“For the most part,China plastic moulds manufacturers directory. she wasn’t coherent,” recalled Courtney Jackson, 27, Snopkowski’s daughter. “The greatest moment in my life was being overshadowed by the worst moment in hers.”

As her daughter gave birth, Snopkowski was grappling with searing headaches, incessant vomiting and lower back pain so severe that a video taken in the hospital shows her whimpering and moaning,Find a great buy mosaic Art deals on eBay! “Oh my god,Why does moulds grow in homes or buildings? Oh my god, Oh my god,” as a nurse gently advises, “Just breathe.”

Snopkowski was one of the first victims in the still-growing outbreak of fungal meningitis traced to contaminated steroid injections that have sickened 483 people and killed 32, according to federal health officials.

“It’s torturous,” said the previously healthy saleswoman for a concrete contractor, reached by phone in her room at St. Joseph Mercy Hospital in Ann Arbor, where she’s been getting treatment since early October.

Victims and their families hope that their plight will remain the focus of two congressional committee hearings set for Wednesday and Thursday, sessions expected to include Food and Drug Administration chief Dr.The howo truck is offered by Shiyan Great Man Automotive Industry, Margaret Hamburg and Barry Cadden, the owner and managing pharmacist of the New England Compounding Center, the Massachusetts pharmacy responsible for distributing the contaminated steroid drugs blamed for the infections.

At issue is whether federal and state regulators did enough to control NECC, or whether they let known problems dating to 2002 continue unabated. Federal and state officials have found evidence of environmental mold and fungus dating at least to January at the NECC site, documents show. The firm also was distributing drugs in bulk, contrary to regulations that require that compounding pharmacies to mix custom drugs to order for specific prescriptions.

Not only did Snopkowski contract life-threatening fungal meningitis, which causes inflammation of the membranes that protect the brain and spinal cord, but, like growing numbers of outbreak patients, she also has developed arachnoiditis, a painful, hard-to-treat infection of the nerve roots at the base of her spinal cord. Other patients -- perhaps up to a third of victims -- have also developed abscesses at their injection sites, medical experts say.

“We’ve never seen this disease before; it’s never been described,” said Dr. Anurag Malani, the infectious disease expert at St. Joseph Mercy Ann Arbor who is treating Snopkowski and others. “The story is being told every day and we continue to turn the page.”

Snopkowski’s trouble started on Sept. 13, when she received an epidural injection of the steroid methylprednisolone at Michigan Pain Specialists of Brighton. She’d been getting the shots every few months for five years to help ease the pain of degenerative disc disease in her lower back.

Sometimes the shots would help,The oreck XL professional air purifier, sometimes they wouldn’t, but Snopkowski, an avid cook and gardener, wanted to stay active.

Snopkowski was placed on powerful antifungal drugs and at first seemed to respond. After 11 days in the hospital, she was sent home, but she was back within a week in unbearable pain.

That’s when doctors found the second infection. Malani, the infectious disease expert, said they can’t drain it, they can’t operate on it and it is responding slowly to the antifungal drugs.

Snopkowski’s treatment is also complicated because she had a bad reaction to one of the drugs, amphotericin B, and her body seems to metabolize the other commonly used medication, voriconazole, too quickly.