Nurse in Missing Fentanyl Case Gets License Back; Abortion Ban Exceptions Useless?

Welcome to the latest edition of Investigative Roundup, highlighting some of the best investigative reporting on healthcare each week.

Nurse in Missing Fentanyl Case Gets License Back

Amy Matthews, DNP, RN, the chief nursing officer at a New Hampshire hospital where almost 8 gallons of fentanyl solution went missing, got her license back, according to the New Hampshire Union Leader.

Matthews’ license was suspended on May 26 following “concerns regarding supervision over the nurses” at Cheshire Medical Center, a spokesperson for New Hampshire’s Office of Professional Licensure and Certification previously told ABC affiliate WMUR.

More than half of the bags of fentanyl solution may have been stolen by Alexandra Towle, a former nurse who worked at the hospital before dying unexpectedly on March 3. Towle had admitted she took the solution as a way to cope with pandemic stress, but Matthews did not appear to be involved with these incidents. Matthews was, however, in charge of nursing operations that included security, accounting, and the management of controlled substances, according to the Union Leader.

A spokesperson said the hospital was “pleased by the Board of Nursing action” to reinstate Matthews’ license. The hospital is working with government agencies on the ongoing investigation and initiated a corrective plan to avoid future losses of controlled substances.

Abortion Ban Exceptions May Be Meaningless

Post-Roe, most states that already enacted abortion bans have no exceptions for ending pregnancies resulting from rape and incest. But even in states that do have these exceptions, healthcare professionals operating in a confusing legal landscape likely won’t take the chance, Politico reported.

Giovannina Anthony, MD, an ob/gyn in Wyoming, said even after reading the law and asking an attorney, she’s still not sure how to help patients who tell her they’ve been raped or sexually assaulted. She told Politico she doesn’t want to face a potential 14 years in prison, but “I also can’t imagine a patient who has been raped or assaulted and is pregnant and calling for help and, as a gynecologist, to say to her, ‘Sorry, you’re on your own.’ It’s just horrific.”

Wyoming and three other states — Idaho, Mississippi, and North Dakota — have rape or incest exceptions, but abortion providers and clinics are much more likely to just send the patient across state lines rather than risk prison time by treating the patients in-state, according to Politico. Abortion rights advocates and others say the laws are so vague and exclude so many people, it’s almost as if the exceptions didn’t exist.

One abortion advocate, Laurie Bertram Roberts, told Politico that exceptions are just a way for Republicans to placate those who believe rape and incest are the only excuses for a “good abortion.” But “If you think you’re one of the ‘good people’ who would only need an abortion in a ‘good instance’ — baby, they came for you already, too. They’re not going to let you have an abortion, either,” Roberts told Politico.

Meanwhile, even anti-abortion groups are divided over rape and incest exceptions — but some clinics, like the Red River Women’s Clinic in North Dakota, say that even with exceptions, those procedures alone wouldn’t be enough to keep the doors open. The clinic is planning to move just across the river to Minnesota, where abortion is legal.

African Scientists Ignored in Run-Up to Monkeypox Outbreak

African researchers said they’ve long been warning about the potential for monkeypox to spread more widely, as they noticed it had been behaving in new ways, according to Nature.

One Nigerian epidemiologist, Adesola Yinka-Ogunleye, MPH, warned in 2017 that monkeypox was appearing in urban settings in Nigeria — beyond its typically rural distribution — and that infected people sometimes had genital lesions, which suggested a new kind of spread through sexual contact.

In sub-Saharan Africa, other researchers noted, monkeypox cases had been rising because vaccination for smallpox, which also protects against monkeypox, had ended in 1980. Thus, the proportion of the population without that protection was increasing.

Meanwhile, Western nations had been stockpiling smallpox vaccines in case the virus was accidentally released from a lab or weaponized. But some of these vaccines would have been useful in Africa, said Steve Ahuka, MD, PhD, a virologist at the University of Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. At the very least, researchers said, the vaccines could have been used to vaccinate front-line health workers or immunocompromised people at highest risk.

African health officials are also convinced, if the global COVID-19 response is anything to go by, that sub-Saharan Africa’s needs to address monkeypox will continue to be overlooked. Even inoculation isn’t enough, according to Nigerian infectious disease physician Dimie Ogoina, MBBS, because the source of the problem is human-animal contact.

“Isolated solutions that fix the problem for developed countries alone and leave out developing countries will lead us through the same cycle again,” Ogoina told Nature. “It’s just a matter of time.”