The Center For Disease Control estimates that thousands of people received a shot of the tainted (with black mold) vials in past the bodies primary defense systems and into areas near the spine.
“I don’t think there is a precedent for this kind of thing,” said Dr. Arjun Srinivasan
of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Health officials and doctors have tracked down most of the 14,000 people potentially at risk for fungal meningitis, blamed for the deaths of 24 people and for sickening more than 300. “This is definitely new territory for us,” he said. The fungus’ brown-black color signals an armor that — along with being injected near the spine — helped this mold sneak past the immune defenses of otherwise healthy people, said Dr. Arturo Casadevall, a fungal specialist at New York’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
“What we’re dealing with here is fundamentally different” from a typical fungal infection, he said. “This is a bug that most of us don’t know much about.”
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
