Word: sencer
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Sencer of the National Communicable Disease Center declared that of the estimated 500 million medical lab tests done each year in the U.S., no less than 25%, or 125 million, produce defective or dangerously wrong results...
...Sencer cited examples: > The wife of an Army sergeant was said by a hospital laboratory to have group-B Rh-positive blood and was given transfusions of that type. In reality, her blood was group 0; she suffered permanent kidney damage. - Twin boys were born to a woman in Alabama whose blood had twice been typed as Rh-positive; actually it was negative, and the twins died of a blood-destroying anemia. Indeed, of 328 blood-disorder deaths in the newborn studied in California, 34.5% were associated with laboratory errors, and many could have been prevented. - A newspaperman...
...orders 100 tests a month to bill his patients for tests at $3 to $10 each. At whatever price, a test is worse than useless and may have fatal results unless the technicians know how to run it and have the right equipment. On this score also, Dr. Sencer had bad news. More than 20% of test materials examined by the NCDC were found faulty...
There is wide variation in the quality of testing done in laboratories within hospitals, largely as a result of the shortage of trained technicians. There is still greater variation in the backroom labs behind doctors' offices, but just how good or bad their work is, said Dr. Sencer, has never been surveyed. And in the best-regulated, best-run labs, mental obsolescence is a major problem-many doctors, as well as technicians, learned their skills 20 or more years ago, before most of the 1,000 testing procedures now known had been developed...