Pain Compounded on 5th Anniversary of Outbreak

By Walter F. Roche Jr.

For Vicki Scott, a Virginia victim of the 2012 fungal meningitis outbreak, the pain continued even as the fifth anniversary of the outbreak's discovery quietly passed last month.
Scott, who at first had a difficult time getting officials to even acknowledge she was a victim, says she now has found it virtually impossible to find healthcare providers willing to treat her continuing ailments.
The Roanoke resident said she has been told she will have to move to another state to get needed care.
For Patricia Martin, a Nashville, Tenn. resident the pain is of a different sort. She lost her mother, Mary, to the outbreak..
"It's been five years since I was last with Mom. She left this earth not of her own accord but at the hands of a compounding pharmacy," Martin wrote in an email.
The toll of the outbreak at the anniversary date was itself compounded by the October verdict in the trial of Glenn Chin, the pharmacist who personally compounded the methylprednnisolone acetate badly contaminated with a deadly fungus.
While jurors in U.S. District Court in Boston, Mass. found Chin guilty of racketeering and mail fraud they cleared him of  25 counts of second degree murder. Victims, including several who witnessed parts of the trial, expressed anger and disappointment with the verdict.
They had the same emotions earlier this year when another federal jury cleared co-defendant Barry J. Cadden of the same 25 second degree murder counts. Cadden, like Chin, was convicted on racketeering and mail fraud charges and is already serving a nine-year prison sentence at a federal prison in Western Pennsylvania. Chin's sentencing is set for Jan. 30.
"I want to scream out about the wrong that was inflicted on her, the sad way she left this earth and the fact she deserved so much better," Martin wrote on Oct. 25, the anniversary of her mother's death.
Martin said she is very conscious of the fact that other victims of the outbreak who survived are now suffering from a variety of ailments, some caused by the fungal meningitis they contracted and others from the after effects of powerful anti-fungal drugs they were forced to tolerate.
Stating that she cannot imagine the pain living victims are enduring, Martin said, "Often I think I got off easy. Today I allow myself to feel the pain and disgust."
Scott is one for whom the physical pain continues.
"My health is terrible," Scott said in a recent interview.
She said when she finally was able to get an appointment with a specialist, it was canceled at the last minute.
"I am extremely ill and I'm being denied care," she said.
Other victims from Maryland to Indiana say they have confronted the same problem with physicians and other health care providers declining to treat them.

Scott said one physician told her that her condition was just "too complex" to handle.
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