Questions about the hepatitis scare

Less than one hour after I discovered that my tests for hepatitis and HIV were negative, I sat across from the man I had feared for three days might have infected me with a deadly disease.

It was a surreal moment after the fear and loathing of a lost weekend. Dr. Dipak Desai, who performed a colonoscopy on me in 2004, wouldn’t talk to me for the record during a brief meeting this week. But until he hired the client-muzzling Rick Wright, I had high hopes the meeting was a prelude to interviewing him on “Face to Face.” I doubt that will happen now, but the physician I and tens of thousands of others once trusted has a story to tell, one that clearly will not jibe with the portrait of a callous, avaricious doctor sketched by the Health District and colored in by the media.

The crisis trajectory here was perfectly predictable: announcement of public health scare. Media frenzy begins. Public gets scared. Patients get outraged, hire lawyers. Attorneys see opportunity, advertise for clients. Media frenzy continues. Elected officials react and overreact, demonize doctors, shut business, perform for cameras and scribes. Law enforcement gets involved. Media frenzy continues.

So what do we know? We know the cork cannot be put back into this bottle Desai & Co. likely will lose everything and might face criminal charges, some patients will have legitimate claims and others might not (but might still pursue them) and politicians will continue to battle for headlines.

But what don’t we know? Now that my own “what if” question has been answered what if I had been infected? I am struck by how many more global ones remain and how confounding this story really is:

• What if Desai and the clinic administrators actually either mandated or ignored systemic medical practices that attorney Will Kemp called Third World and Health District epidemiologist Brian Labus said would have to be upgraded to be Third World? No matter what the pressures of the modern medical business system, with diminishing reimbursements for doctors and what Kemp called a “fast-food medicine” culture, the diabolical nature of such behavior is unfathomable in this country or many other nations. These people would not only be demonstrably evil endangering people whose lives had been entrusted to them but recklessly stupid knowing, as even laymen might, that the risk of an infectious outbreak would be great.

• What if this really was isolated to that cluster last year and the Health District created an unnecessary near-panic by its massive notification? As devastating as it was to learn I might have been infected, my intellectual side never could reconcile how these doctors, knowing the risk to their livelihoods and reputations, would have countenanced such practices as reusing syringes and anesthesia vials. And it never made much sense to me that if this has been going on for years, all of these trained staff, including nurses, would simply have gone along out of fear for their employment and not reported the center. Could there be another explanation, and what could it possibly be?

• What if the politicians now striking a balance between responding to their constituents and grandstanding for the media and some of them actually do care about responsibility are discovered to have been partially responsible for this scare because of their actions? The state health division inspects prisons more often (twice a year) than it does ambulatory surgical facilities such as the Endoscopy Center of Southern Nevada (once every three years). And the cascading suspensions of various licenses by local governments hey, Henderson and North Las Vegas did it too! show elected officials are very good at being reactive but fall down when it comes to proactive, farsighted policies, especially ones that cost money.

It will be hard to answer any of these questions right away, as we are swept up in a community paroxysm of anger and fear. I understand those emotions all too well. But this is too important for us to succumb to gut responses, no matter how we are tugged by opportunists and demagogues, elected and otherwise.

It’s been a long time since I was suffused with the kind of relief I felt Monday morning when I heard that my tests were negative. But for those unlucky enough to have an infectious disease, the politicians and regulators owe them the truth, whatever that turns out to be, and a punishment that fits the crime, whatever that turns out to be.

By all means, let’s haul out the gallows. Let’s just make sure we hang the right people.