CONVENTION CRASHING: ONCOLOGY NURSING SOCIETY

Thursday, April 26, 2007 | 7:02 a.m.

Despite, or perhaps because of, Ben Stiller comedies, fewer than 10 percent of nurses are men, which explains why at least one of the Mandalay Bay Convention Center men's rooms was turned over to women on Tuesday.

It would also explain the handful of jewelry and purse vendors who had bought themselves space on the expo floor.

The hair products, though, were strictly for patients.

This was a convention for the Oncology Nursing Society, a gathering of 8,000 nurses who work with cancer patients.

They do so not without risk to themselves.

Most cancer-fighting drugs are poisons. They slow or stop the growth of new cells, and since the whole problem with tumors is their speed of growth - new cancer cells appear much faster than old cells die - chemotherapy can slow or shrink tumors.

But the poisons involved are indiscriminate and spread throughout the body, where they also inhibit fast-growing cells in the hair, nails, skin, mucus glands and immune system. Cancer patients are subjected to brief regimens of the drugs and given time to recover between doses.

It's nasty stuff and since 2004, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health has recommended nurses protect themselves by wearing two pairs of gloves, a disposable gown and face shields. Anyone regularly exposed to anti-cancer drugs risks rashes, liver and kidney damage, miscarriages, sterility and possibly leukemia and other forms of cancer.

This is where George "Doc" Lopez sees an opportunity. A former internal medicine physician, Lopez is founder, president and CEO of ICU Medical, and has built a $642 million empire out of medical equipment.

While Lopez's wife was dying of breast cancer last year, he says , they became concerned about nurses administering anti-cancer drugs, which sometimes involves using a syringe to draw the drug out of a vial, carrying the syringe to the bedside and mixing it with the intravenous fluid.

"They may be saving lives, but at their own peril and their family's," Lopez said.

Drug vials are pumped dry of air and sealed with rubber, which means you have to inject a volume of air to withdraw an equal amount of liquid. However, if you withdraw less in drugs than you insert in air, the pressure in the vial will be greater than that outside, so when you withdraw the needle, a bit of the drug may spray out as a mist.

For this, Lopez has a little gadget you screw atop the vial. It punctures the rubber and inserts a tube and a small balloon. When you draw liquid from the vial, the difference in pressure causes the balloon to inflate an equal volume - no mist.

As part of this system, you're drawing the fluid into an ICU Medical needle-free syringe that doesn't drip and will connect to another ICU Medical product, a valve on the IV rig. Put together, these disposable, one-time-use parts cost maybe $4. Because oncology clinics go through many vials, syringes and IV bags, this is a pretty good revenue stream, like razor blades or water filters.

Some nurses, like Vicki Koceja , who works at St. Rose-Dominican hospital in Henderson, say they feel comfortable with existing precautions, which in her case include having the hospital pharmacy mix chemotherapy drug IV bags. "It's as safe anything," she said.

Others, like Ohio nurse Linda Gopalakrishnan, said she would welcome an extra layer of precautions. She and other younger nurses worry particularly about sterility, miscarriage or birth defects, she said.

"The young nurses just out of school," Gopalakrishnan said, "they all have their double gloves on, every time."

Lopez also figures that in a couple of years it will be a moot point, with either government guidelines or legal pressures requiring the use of something like his products.

"The lawyers will find out about this and start honing in on this," Lopez said, "and they'll make millions of dollars."