WORLD : VA Hospital Injects Patient With AIDS Victim’s Blood by Mistake

A veterans hospital mistakenly injected the blood of an AIDS victim into another patient in the same ward who had the same surname.

“This is an absolute tragedy. We are devastated by this,” said Dr. Darwin Palmer, chief of infectious diseases at the Veterans Administration Medical Center.

The error was discovered less than an hour after the patient, who is seriously ill with an undisclosed ailment, was injected Wednesday, Palmer said.

“If this patient, who is very ill, lives long enough, he will unfortunately have a good chance of developing the AIDS virus infection,” Palmer said.

The hospital immediately notified the patient of the error and offered him high-dose antiviral therapy, including the drug AZT--”the best therapy we have”--in an effort to stave off any infection, Palmer said.

The hospital normally takes several precautions to prevent injection of the wrong patient, including checking the patient’s name, identification number and armband and talking to the patient about the test, Palmer said.

“I have to assume they did all these things, but they didn’t look closely enough,” said Palmer, who also is a professor at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine.

The question of liability remains to be determined but it appears that several people were involved in the mistake, Palmer said.