Unprecedented TB cluster at Nemours | Philly Health Insider
And updates on the Penn nurses who were injured by a hit-and-run driver
Good morning. This week, we’ve got:
Exclusive details on a cluster of rifampin-resistant TB that caught Nemours by surprise this spring.
Fancy pants: Would you spend $85 on scrubs? Figs is banking on it.
Tragedy at Penn Presbyterian Hospital: Updates on the three nurses who were injured (one critically) by a hit-and-run-driver who was dropping off a gunshot victim.
Philly biotech gets $60 million from a surprising source: a TED initiative.
📮 Nurses face a number of on-the-job hazards. What could be done to keep them safer? For a chance to be featured in this newsletter, email us back.
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— Aubrey Whelan and Alison McCook, Inquirer health reporters, @aubreyjwhelan @alisonmccook
Our big read today takes you inside an unprecedented cluster of tuberculosis cases at Nemours Children’s Hospital in Wilmington.
This spring, an 11-month-old baby arrived at Nemours with concerning respiratory symptoms — and eventually was diagnosed with tuberculosis.
A day later, three more children arrived at the hospital, also having been exposed to TB. It was an unusual influx of TB patients for Nemours, which typically only treats one to two cases a year. And these cases were more challenging than most: the strain of tuberculosis that had infected the children was resistant to the antibiotic rifampin, a common treatment for the illness.
At Nemours, a 220-bed hospital with just 10 isolation rooms for infectious disease, staff worked to navigate a host of challenges facing the kids, from medication delays to language barriers to the mental health issues that can arise from isolation. The staff helped the kids’ worried parents make them home-cooked food and sent therapists clad in PPE to engage them in art and music therapy.
They also took lessons from the strain of managing so many cases of an infectious disease at the same time. Read more for details on the tuberculosis cluster, and how Nemours handled it.
The latest news to pay attention to
Early Saturday morning, a silver Jeep Cherokee pulled up to Penn Presbyterian’s ambulance bay area to drop off a 28-year-old man with multiple gunshot wounds. As three nurses stepped up to help the patient, the driver sped off, hitting the nurses and the shooting victim. Two nurses have been released from the hospital, but one is still in critical condition, Penn officials said Tuesday, and police have IDed a suspect in the case. Penn is also now requiring drivers to turn off their engines and leave the car before nurses extricate a patient from a private vehicle. Click here for more details on the accident.
Who says scrubs have to be frumpy? Healthcare apparel brand Figs is betting you will be willing to shell out extra money for more fitted or flared styles in bright colors. Click here to read the backstory, and guess which neighborhood they chose for a new Philly store.
Every Cure is using $60 million from a TED initiative for “big ideas” to further its mission of employing AI to help match existing treatments to new diseases. It’s a personal effort for one of the company’s co-founders.
Today’s big number: 45%.
That’s the percentage of pregnancy-associated deaths in Pennsylvania that were attributed to a mental health condition in 2020, according to state data.
Pregnancy-associated deaths are any deaths that take place during pregnancy or in the year after a pregnant person gives birth.
A new bill to combat these deaths, spearheaded by state Rep. Elizabeth Fiedler (D.-Philadelphia), just passed the Pennsylvania legislature, and Gov. Josh Shapiro plans to sign it into law. The law would require the state health department to launch a public health campaign to educate more patients on postpartum depression and anxiety, and distribute a fact sheet that health providers will be encouraged to hand out to patients.
“I think Pennsylvania can do a lot better for new moms and babies,” Fiedler told Aubrey in a recent interview.
After failing two license renewal inspections and operating under a temporary license for a year, St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children has obtained a new three-year license. Click here for insider details on how the North Philadelphia safety net hospital resolved the safety, sanitation, and patient privacy issues that held up the licensing process for so long.
A female patient of childbearing age is showing signs of hyperandrogenism, insulin resistance, severe acne, and irregular periods — perhaps only two or three per year. What’s on your radar?
If you answered polycystic ovary syndrome, or PCOS, you’re correct.
Thankfully, more providers and researchers are recognizing PCOS, something for which Patricia Davis, an obstetrician and gynecologist at Jefferson Abington Hospital, is grateful.
Since 1963, the University City Science Center has helped get home-grown health care innovations to the market, supporting more than 700 startups and 1 out of every 142 jobs in greater Philadelphia. This summer, the Science Center added five new members to its Board of Directors: Liv Carter, senior relationship manager, commercial banking, TD Bank; Donald “Guy” Generals, president of Community College of Philadelphia; Josh Gladden, vice president for research at Temple University; Kevin Mahoney, CEO of Penn Health Systems; and Ivy Silver, an ideation strategist.
A child walks into the ER with symptoms that are hard to understand, pointing to a rare disease. You have little more than an MRI to go on. What do you do next?
The obvious options are asking colleagues and scanning the literature. A new project at CHOP wants to make it much easier.
Using a $10 million grant from ARPA-H, CHOP is gathering electronic health records from children with rare diseases across the country and creating a database that lets users search by additional fields, such as genetic data and images. So a provider could search the tool — known as RADIANT — using the MRI, gathering information from patients across the country with the same MRI, including available clinical trials.
The goal is to make it easier to diagnose patients and figure out the best course of treatment based on what has worked in others. “It’s exciting, exciting times,” said Allison Heath, director of data technology and innovation at CHOP’s Center for Data Driven Discovery in Biomedicine.
📮 Could a tool like RADIANT make a difference in your practice? For a chance to be featured in this newsletter, email us back.
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