DENVER — By her own admission, Kristen Diane Parker cruised for empty operating rooms at the Denver hospital where she worked.
The surgical technician would slip into the rooms and steal syringes of fentanyl, a powerful painkiller, replacing them with syringes she'd filled with saline, she later confessed to investigators.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Saturday, August 22, 2009 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 4 National Desk 2 inches; 95 words Type of Material: Correction
Hepatitis C: An article in Monday's Section A about a hepatitis C outbreak in Colorado said that the disease is incurable. Although the disease can lead to death, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that 15% to 25% of newly infected people will clear the virus from their bodies without treatment and not develop chronic infection. For others, treatment of both acute and chronic cases of hepatitis C can render the virus undetectable. However, patients who have cleared the virus remain at risk for long-term health effects, such as liver cancer, after treatment.
Parker, who has hepatitis C, had allegedly used those decoy syringes -- the source of transmission, authorities believe, for at least 23 Coloradans now infected with the liver-damaging disease.
Parker's arrest this summer has reverberated through the state, prompting the testing of nearly 6,000 patients at a hospital and surgery center and focusing scrutiny on healthcare safety.
"The system is broken," said a 41-year-old Denver woman who contracted hepatitis C after a minor surgery at Rose Medical Center. She spoke on the condition of anonymity. "The system failed not only me, but Kristen. She has an addiction. It was too easy for her to get that drug." As Colorado wraps up its testing, with more than half of the exposed patients believed to be infection-free and results pending for about 2,100 people, two other states where Parker worked are probing the extent of damage she may have wrought.
Transmitted by blood, hepatitis C is treatable but incurable, and can cause lifelong health problems and death.
In Mount Kisco, N.Y., about 2,700 patients at Northern Westchester Hospital are being tested; the hospital has reported five cases, three of which it says are not linked to Parker. She worked there for about five months in 2007 and 2008. Further testing will determine whether the remaining two infections are linked to Parker, hospital spokesman Mark Vincent said.
In Nassau Bay, Texas, authorities are trying to determine when Parker contracted hepatitis before they order tests on patients at Christus St. John Hospital, where Parker worked from 2005 to 2006.
Though cases in which healthcare workers transmit their own diseases to patients are relatively rare, the effects are far-reaching. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have documented four such cases in which 70 patients were infected with hepatitis C between 1992 and 2003, the most recent years for which data were available.
Parker, 26, told police she believes she contracted hepatitis last year, when she became addicted to heroin and shared needles. Authorities say she learned of her illness in October, when she began work at Rose and a pre-employment test detected the disease.
