Fungal Meningitis Outbreak

NECC Recall Information 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) with the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, local health departments and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) continue their investigation into a multistate meningitis outbreak of fungal infections among patients who have received a spinal steroid injection of a potentially contaminated product from New England Compounding Center (NECC).

The FDA will shortly release a list of every healthcare organization and provider who has purchased any product from NECC. Our hospitals along with nearly every other Massachusetts hospital are expected to be on the list.

The FDA reported that no medications linked specifically to the outbreak were shipped to Massachusetts healthcare providers. We want to assure you that at Beverly Hospital and Addison Gilbert Hospital, no patient received the specific product linked to the meningitis fungal infection outbreak.

Strictly as a precaution, all other NECC medications were recalled across the country on October 6, 2012.  The FDA advised healthcare providers to notify patients who received any NECC products after May 21, 2012 - even those products that have not been linked in any way to the outbreak. Beverly Hospital and Addison Gilbert Hospital have notified those patients and their physicians, and provided information on the signs and symptoms of a potential problem. These include:

• fever, headache, stiff neck, confusion, being bothered by bright light (if you had a spine injection);
• painful, swollen or inflamed (warm and red) joints (if you had a joint injection);
• red, painful eyes with or without drainage or blurry vision (if you had eye surgery); or
• swelling, redness, pain or drainage from a surgical wound or other skin site (if you had another kind of surgery).

If you have these symptoms, and they are not the result of some other known problem, then contact your healthcare provider for further advice.

We continue to monitor this situation closely and will update this appropriately as new information becomes available. For more information on the national outbreak related to NECC products shipped to other states, go to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).  For more information on the NECC product recalls, go to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).