The Veterans Affairs Department has identified 12 more veterans who may have received colonoscopies with unsanitary equipment at a VA hospital in in Miami, officials said.
In 2009, VA officials there notified 2,400 war veterans who could have been exposed while undergoing the routine procedure at the hospital since 2004, according to The Miami Herald, which first reported the additional exposures.
VA spokeswoman Mary Kay Hollingsworth said in a statement to AOL News that the hospital has notified 11 of the 12 additional veterans and expects to notify the last patient by Friday.
This is the third time in less than two weeks that VA officials have acknowledged that errors in medical cleaning practices may have exposed the country's veterans to a host of potentially life-threatening infections.
In Dayton, Ohio, on Tuesday, officials said a VA dentist failed to change gloves between patients, and could have exposed at least 535 veterans to infections between 1992 and July 2010. The unnamed dentist hasn't seen patients since July 28, but a VA report, first obtained by the Dayton Daily News, found that employees had known for years that the dentist wasn't following proper hygienic procedures.
" 'I've seen him literally walk from his room with this patient's denture in one hand, go across to another room, open this patient's mouth with this denture of the opposite patient in his hand,' one dental assistant told investigators," according to testimony in the report.
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Surgeries were put on hold Feb. 2 at the John Cochran VA Medical Center in St. Louis when a routine inspection by officials there found water stains on medical equipment that indicated the instruments may have been contaminated.Last July, officials at John Cochran notified 1,812 veterans that they could have been exposed to blood-borne infections, including HIV, at the center's dental clinic because of improper cleaning practices there. In a statement to The Associated Press today, Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki called the problem an "isolated" incident.
Peter Gaytan, the executive director of The American Legion, a veterans' advocacy group, called the latest round of exposures "inexcusable" in a statement to AOL News today, but said they were coming to light, in part, because of better oversight from VA officials.
