The No. 1 killer in US hospital is… secrecy

What’s the biggest killer in hospitals? Secrecy. That’s the takeaway from the feds — specifically, the Government Accountability Office and the Food and Drug Administration.

Both agencies report that hospitals are failing to disclose when medical devices injure or kill patients by spreading cancer cells throughout their bodies or infecting them with superbugs. Federal regulation requires hospitals and doctors to notify the FDA of these “adverse events” immediately, but that regulation often goes ignored.

“There is limited to no reporting” from some hospitals, says an FDA official. When hospitals stay mum, future patients become the victims.

Women with noncancerous growths called uterine fibroids, for example. More than 70 percent of women over 50 suffer from them. Until recently, as many as 50,000 women a year were treated with a surgical device called a morcellator — a long tube with a spinning blade on the end to shred fibroids — even though hospitals already knew or had reason to suspect using the device might spread cancer in women with undetected tumors.

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