Dentist Allegedly Exposed Patients to HIV, Hepatitis

Patients of Tulsa, Okla., dentist may have been endangered by unclean instruments.

Health officials are saying that a tosser dentist may have exposed thousands of patients to life-threating diseases ranging from HIV to Hepatitis. ABC's chief health and medical editor Dr. Rechard Besser is here with this disturbing story this morning.

It is disturbing. You know, I have spent my career in public health and it's not hard to prevent infections in dental offices. But what they found here was absolutely shocking.

Dr. W. Scott Harrington has been a trusted oral surgeon for 36 years. But now authorities believe he may have exposed thousands of patients to potentially deadly infections by allegedly using rusty instruments which weren't cleaned properly. Letters has been sent to 7,000 Oklahoma patients recommending they immediately be tested for Hepatitis B. Hepatitis C and HIV after one of his patients with no known risk factors tested positive for Hepatitis C. In addtion to allegations that he cleaned his instruments by improperly bleaching them which caused them to become porous over time he's also accused or reusing needles and vials.

The instruments that came out of the autoclave(高壓鍋；高壓滅菌器) were horrible. I wouldn't let my nephews play with them out in dirt, I mean they were horrible, they have rust on them.

He even reportedly had medications 20 years past the expiration date, and allowed unlicensed assistants to give IV (intravenous) medication. We've reached out to Dr. Harrington but he did not return calls.

So 7,000 patients have got these letters to get tested for HIV, Hepatitis C, Hepatitis A. I mean, what is, what are the chances more patients are gonna test positive given those conditions.

Well, yeah, I mean, there are a couple of distrubing factors here. You know, many patients in his practice have HIV and Hepatitis C.

He was treating a high risk population.

He was, he was. And he had instrumets set aside for those patients and other instruments for patients where he didn't know there whether they were infected or not. That's very dangerous. All instruments shoud be treated the same. You know, last summer there were, there were 8,000 patients from Colorado who were notified and thankfully there none of them were infected. Here there's a much higher chance some people would get.

But I would have thought soaking instruments in bleach would have killed anything - we keep hearing bleaches are the only thing that kills everything.

Well, for a lot of things, bleaches are the way to go; but these instruments have to go into something called an autoclave which uses pressure and heat. If you use bleaches on them first it disturbs the outside of the instruments so the autoclave no longer works.

And they become porous and things can get inside.

They can seek bin and then the heat and the pressure don't kill those germs.

So what are we supposed to look for, Rechard, I mean, I got to a dentist office and usually I'v got so much stuff in my mouth I can't see what's going on.

A couple clues to look for:

The first thing, if you ever see rusty or old instruments, that's a warning sign. The other is if your dentist isn't wearing gloves or isn't changing gloves between patients, find another dentist.

So he should do that in front of me.

Definitely. You should see that they are putting on fresh gloves, definitely.

OK, I'll pay attention to those instruments.

That's right.

But thanks so much. Disturbing news. We'll keep on top of that.