"It's quite painful to follow, actually," said the 60-year-old North Carolina lawyer, recalling a similar outbreak that killed his mother, Mary Virginia Scyster, in 2002. "It took my mother 66 days to die."
Scyster was a victim in an outbreak eerily similar to the one now unfolding. In both, a steroid called methylprednisolone acetate became contaminated with black fungus during production by compounding pharmacies making large quantities of the drug.
In 2002, at least seven people got sick and two died after being injected with a drug made by a South Carolina pharmacy. In the current outbreak, 419 people have become ill and 30 have died.
Despite the much higher numbers, nothing much has changed. Mass production of high-risk medicines by local drug stores continues — not only in South Carolina but in most other states as well.
"There appear to be no lessons learned from our outbreak in terms of oversight and regulation of these pharmacies," said Jeffrey Engel, a 58-year-old physician who as North Carolina's state epidemiologist investigated the 2002 incident. All the cases occurred in North Carolina.
His view is shared by the infectious diseases expert who diagnosed Scyster's rare infection.
"It's déjà vu for sure," said Srilatha Edupuganti, 44, who was at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and is now at Emory University in Atlanta. "It's painful that it's happening again."
In the earlier incident, health authorities recalled the drug made by Urgent Care Pharmacy of Spartanburg, S.C. South Carolina's Board of Pharmacy found the pharmacy unsanitary and its sterilization practices inadequate. It suspended the pharmacist's license for four years and fined him $10,000. Ultimately, the drug store closed and lawsuits were filed.
In the current outbreak, officials recalled tainted lots produced by New England Compounding Center of Framingham, Mass.
"I'm struck that this happened again," said Engel, who now heads the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists in Atlanta. "There should be a cease and desist until safety can be guaranteed. Where is the next one happening?"
Traditional compounding involves a pharmacist making a drug only after getting a prescription with an individual patient's name on it. Urgent Care Pharmacy and New England Compounding Center were involved in a different type of compounding, which involved the small-batch mass production of drugs — including the riskiest ones, "sterile injectables — by gowned technicians working in clean rooms with special ventilation.
This type of drug-making in pharmacies continues because 42 states permit some form of what's known as "compounding for office use." That allows pharmacists to prepare many doses of a drug without patient-specific prescriptions and to provide them to doctors' offices and clinics based on those places' regular need.
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