Thoughts from Austin: NAACCR Annual Meeting

This week I am attending the meetings of the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries that is being held in Austin, Texas. The topic of this year’s conference is “Thinking big, the future of cancer surveillance”, and I’m involved in two activities. The...

Drugs recalled by New England Compounding Center: The tip of the iceberg?

As hypotheses are tested and rejected, the remaining hypotheses are those that plausibly might explain the observed pattern. But how often do we include medications contaminated with foreign agents — fungus, bacteria, or otherwise — in our set of explanatory hypotheses? Until now, rarely, if ever. What we are learning from the New England Compounding Center is that contaminated medications largely explain the observed outbreak of fungal meningitis.