Jon,
Your call for moderation and a non-emotional investigation is a true credit to your profession. This will be difficult to do for the reasons you have enumerated, but critical, nonetheless. As a nurse anesthetist in private practice, I am outraged at the prospect of other practitioners engaging in the criminal activities mentioned in some of the reports.

This is such a radical departure from accepted practice, however, that the investigators need to be very sure before anyone is implicated. There are many details that must be adhered to in order to comfortably and successfully get the information you need from a colonoscopic exam. Departure from practice standards at any of dozens of points will possibly injure the patient, or at the very least, negate the effectiveness of the exam.

I have to think, though, that if anyone giving intravenous medication, be it anesthesiologist, nurse anesthetist, or registered nurse, were reusing contaminated medication vials, syringes, or needles in a facility that averages 50 colonoscopes a day, we would be looking at 600 to 1000 cases of Hep C, not 6.

Perhaps, it is a clerical lapse in technique? By this I mean taking 1 vial of medicine labeled for "single patient use" and drawing it into 5 different clean syringes. This decreases the cost to each patient by utilizing drug that would otherwise be thrown away and is absolutely clean and sterile from an infection control standpoint but is technically "wrong" according to labeled usage.

I am going to reserve judgement until more information is made available but I know there are those that will not. This is an unfortunate but predictable response. As a health care practitioner with 20 years experience, I will hope for the best, but if anyone knowingly used contaminated instruments on a patient (i.e. the anesthesiologist from New York in November 2007)...."let’s haul out the gallows" or at the very least, end their health care career.

The "good" nurse anesthetists, nurses, and anesthesiologists that I have worked with now and in the past feel the same way about the "bad" practitioners.