WALL STREET JOURNAL REPORTS:
"A similar incident last year nearly killed the newborn twins of Dennis Quaid, turning the actor into an activist on hospital errors."
http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2008/07/09/h...
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EmpowHer's HealthDay Reports:
A newborn baby has died at a Corpus Christi, Texas, hospital after receiving an overdose of the blood thinner heparin, the local Caller-Times newspaper reported Wednesday.

WASHINGTON — Federal drug regulators believe that a contaminant detected in a crucial blood thinner that has caused 81 deaths was added deliberately, something the Food and Drug Administration has only hinted at previously.

“F.D.A.’s working hypothesis is that this was intentional contamination, but this is not yet proven,” Dr. Janet Woodcock, director of the Food and Drug Administration’s drug center, told the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations in written testimony given Tuesday.

By Amanda Gardner
EmpowHer's HealthDay Reporter

WEDNESDAY, April 23 (HealthDay News) -- U.S. researchers say they've confirmed that lots of the blood thinner heparin pulled from the market are contaminated with a man-made chemical called oversulfated chondroitin sulfate.

The findings were published online Wednesday in Nature Biotechnology.

And, according to a paper published online simultaneously in the New England Journal of Medicine, the same researchers state that regulators now have at their disposal a test to detect contaminated heparin.

By Amanda Gardner
EmpowHer's HealthDay Reporter

WEDNESDAY, April 23 (HealthDay News) -- U.S. researchers say they've confirmed that lots of the blood thinner heparin pulled from the market are contaminated with a man-made chemical called oversulfated chondroitin sulfate.

By Steven Reinberg
EmpowHer's HealthDay Reporter

THURSDAY, Feb. 28 (HealthDay News) -- Baxter Healthcare Corp., the pharmaceutical company at the center of recent problems with its blood thinner heparin, announced Thursday that it was recalling any remaining multi-dose vials of the drug as well as single-dose vials.

When a younger woman is put on a blood thinner the doctor or nurse isn’t likely to tell her, “Guess what, this is probably going to make your period a bit of a challenge. It came as a big surprise to me,” said Eliz Greene who is 42 and currently takes Plavix®. “Talking about the “Icky Period” problem is very important, so women don’t think they are the only ones out there going through it.”