Outbreak Delays Some Surgeries

Kaiser Permanente Los Angeles Medical Center in Hollywood suspended some cardiac surgeries Monday after hospital officials found four patients that were infected by the same bacterium last week.

There were no deaths due to serratia, a blood-borne bacterium that can cause fevers and accelerate pulses, and the patients were being treated with antibiotics, said Dr. Jonathan Fielding, Los Angeles County’s public health director.

“This is not something that needs to set off alarm bells,” he said. “There are a lot of bugs in hospitals.”

Fielding said county epidemiologists started tracing the source of the infection over the weekend and plan to finish their report later this week.

He said that the bacterium was usually found in liquids, but that he had no specifics in this case.

Fielding would not say how common such clusters of serratia infections were in hospitals, but did say that they do occur.

“There are 30 to 50 outbreaks of one sort or another in L.A. County on an annual basis,” he said. “This is simply one of those situations.”

Fielding said that emergency surgeries are still being done because antibiotics can treat the infection before or after the operations.

Kaiser spokesman Jim Anderson said the four serratia-afflicted patients developed only fevers.

The hospital received the lab results Friday evening and officials postponed about 10 surgeries Monday and Tuesday “as a precaution,” he said.

Anderson said the hospital was suspending only a particular kind of cardiac surgery that makes up less than 10% of its daily surgeries, though he could not describe which type. He said the hospital has contacted those patients. The hospital has continued to perform other heart surgeries, such as angioplasties.

Anderson said hospital officials are still trying to figure out how the infection spread.

“The interesting thing is we did a whole bunch of surgery last week of a similar kind where there was no infection,” he said. “It makes it a bit of a mystery.”