Copyright 2000 The Chronicle Publishing Co.
The San
Francisco Chronicle
OCTOBER 4, 2000, WEDNESDAY, FINAL EDITION
SECTION: NEWS; Pg. A1
LENGTH: 942 words
HEADLINE:
House OKs Regulations To Require Safe Needles;
Accidental pokes bane of
medical workers
BYLINE: William Carlsen, Carolyn
Lochhead, Chronicle Staff Writers
DATELINE: Washington
BODY:
The House of Representatives yesterday passed
sweeping new regulations to protect the nation's 8 million health care workers
from potentially deadly needle injuries.
The new regulations require the
nation's hospitals and other health care employers to provide their workers with
needles and syringes that include "built-in safety features."
Accidental
needle sticks, which injure up to 800,000 workers each year,
can transmit HIV, hepatitis and other potentially lethal pathogens.
The
federal legislation follows similar regulations that went into effect last year
in California. The California rules, which served as a model for the federal law
and for similar bills passed in 16 other states, were prompted by a Chronicle
series that documented the devastating consequences of needle injuries suffered
by medical workers. The series was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. The federal
needle law, in addition to covering health care providers nationwide, requires
that medical workers directly responsible for patient care be brought into the
process of selecting the safe needle devices they will be asked to use.
An identical bill has been introduced in the Senate by Sen. James
Jeffords, a retiring Vermont Republican, but the outlook there is much murkier.
The bill was never subjected to hearings and has not yet won committee approval.
Now, as Congress aims at a mid-October adjournment, there may not be enough time
for the Senate to vote on the bill.
If the Senate passes the bill
without changes, it will go to President Clinton to be signed into law.
Joe Karpinski, spokesman for the Senate Health and Education Committee,
said Jeffords is "going to do what he can to get it through the Senate before we
adjourn."
Karpinski said one option is to request "unanimous consent"
from all 100 senators, in which case the bill would simply pass without a vote
if no one objected. Another option is to attach the bill as a provision to
another bill.
The Clinton administration made clear yesterday that the
president is prepared to sign the legislation if it passes both houses.
"The administration believes enactment of this bill will . . . make it
clearer to employers that they have a responsibility to use commercially
available safer medical devices that can lessen the risk of injuries from
contaminated sharps," the White House said yesterday in a written statement
after passage of the house bill.
If the Senate does not pass the
legislation, the bills will have to be re-introduced in both houses next year.
Both bills have strong bipartisan support. Co-sponsors of the Senate
bill, for example, include Mike Enzi, a conservative Wyoming Republican, and
Edward Kennedy, a liberal Massachusetts Democrat.
"If you look at the
co-sponsors, you know there's broad agreement on this," said Enzi spokesman Coy
Knobel. "We hope that carries through the rest of the Senate and we can get this
passed before we adjourn."
The legislation also has the support of
health care worker unions, nurses associations, the American Hospital
Association and needle manufacturers.
Eleven representatives from both
parties took the floor of the House yesterday to praise the legislation.
"This will save lives and it will save money," said Rep. Mike Thompson,
D-St. Helena. He said that California's law will save health care providers
millions of dollars a year by eliminating testing and treatment costs for
injured medical workers.
Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, D-N.Y., said that she
worked as a nurse for 30 years and had been stuck accidentally by needles many
times.
"We didn't have the serious kinds of diseases then that we have
now," she said, referring to HIV and hepatitis C. "This legislation is going to
protect health care workers across this nation."
Rep. Pete Stark,
D-Fremont, who has sponsored safety needle legislation annually since 1993,
congratulated the house leadership yesterday for pushing through passage of the
bill.
"Health care workers simply should not be forced to risk their
lives while trying to save ours," he said.
But Stark added that
yesterday's bill covers only workers in the private sector. More legislation is
needed, he said, to give the same protections to workers in public hospitals in
27 states who are not covered by the bill.
The house bill passed
yesterday on a voice vote. It was a major victory for the Service Employees
International Union, the nation's largest health care workers' union, which has
lobbied for years to force employers to provide safer needle devices for their
workers.
In 1998, The Chronicle reported that tens of thousands of
nurses, doctors, laboratory technicians and public safety workers have
contracted hepatitis and HIV over the last decade while new safer needle
technology was available but not used because of its higher cost and lax
government regulation.
Needle safety mechanisms include syringes with
needles that automatically retract into the barrel, needles that are
self-blunting, and sheaths that slide over needles to protect the health care
worker after the needle has been used.
Yesterday's house vote was an
emotional moment for Ellen Dayton, a San Francisco nurse who contracted HIV and
hepatitis C from a needle stick in March 1996 and has fought to pass the law.
"This is so important," she said, her voice cracking with emotion and
the side effects of the drugs she takes to control her disease. If the bill
passes in the Senate, she said, "people will not have to go through what I have
had to go through."
E-mail William Carlsen at
wcarlsen@sfchronicle.com and Carolyn Lochhead at clochhead@sfchronicle.com.
LOAD-DATE: October 4, 2000 
