State health officials say they have identified the first hepatitis C case from Audubon Surgery Center in Colorado Springs apparently caused by jailed surgery technician Kristen Diane Parker.
But Audubon spokesman Joe Hodas said the hospital disagrees with the state’s analysis and that more rigorous genetic testing still to come will disprove the link to Parker.
“We’ve drawn a slightly different conclusion than the state,” Hodas said. “There’s additional clinical information we believe is relevant to making that assessment.”
He said further details would compromise patient confidentiality.
More than a dozen cases so far have been linked to Parker from her work at Rose Medical Center in Denver.
State public health officials on Friday upped their count of surgery patients infected at Rose to 14, while the U.S. attorney’s office prosecuting Parker has said their investigation so far has established 19 cases at Rose.
Test labs are processing nearly 6,000 patient samples, including 4,700 at Rose and 1,200 at Audubon who had surgery during the months Parker was working. She was indicted by a federal grand jury Thursday on 42 counts of product tampering and using fraud to get controlled drugs.
Prosecutors and state health officials said Parker, who had hepatitis C, stole the powerful sedative fentanyl from surgery carts, used the syringes on herself, then replaced contaminated needles for use in surgery.
Parker, 26, told investigators she had used similar theft and replacement methods at Audubon, but no patients from the surgery center had tested positive until this week.
Diagnostic labs hired by the hospitals have now gone through about 2,700 results. There have been 22 positive hepatitis C cases not related to Parker, which is expected because a small percentage of any population is likely to carry the virus from various sources.
Fourteen of the state-reported cases linked to Parker have a preliminary match with her genotype. The labs then do a detailed analysis of genetic material that can take months, which could more definitively tie the patient cases to Parker’s actions. The state said it has one analysis completed so far that, based on viral sequencing, is “highly related” to Parker.
All the officials involved in the testing and counting said the results are fluid, and that totals will fluctuate as Parker’s genetic type is ruled in or ruled out by various levels of testing.
Michael Booth: 303-954-1686 or mbooth@denverpost.com
