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A commonly used medical scope linked to a deadly bacterial outbreak at UCLA may be so flawed it cannot be properly cleaned, federal officials conceded Thursday. But they stopped short of recalling the device or outlining any new sterilization procedures. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has known about the potential problems for more than two years, and took action only after The Times reported this week that two patients died in a new superbug outbreak at UCLA's Ronald Reagan Medical Center. (Levey, Terhune and Willman, 2/19)

UCLA hospital officials said they began investigating the possibility of a deadly bacterial outbreak in mid-December, but one patient's account suggests they missed a chance to discover the problem much earlier. That patient, an 18-year-old man still hospitalized at UCLA Ronald Reagan Medical Center, was first diagnosed in October with the drug-resistant superbug CRE after he was treated with a medical scope tied to outbreaks at hospitals across the country, his attorney said Thursday. UCLA declined to discuss specific patients but said it acted swiftly as soon as it discovered the problem. (Terhune, Panzar and Petersen, 2/19)

Among the seven people infected by a "superbug" outbreak tied to medical instruments at a Los Angeles hospital is an 18-year-old student who has spent nearly three months in the hospital and is in grave condition, his attorney said. The young man was struggling not to become the third of those infected at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center to die, Attorney Kevin Boyle said Thursday. (Chang and Rogers, 2/20)

The Food and Drug Administration issued a warning Thursday for a medical device widely used in hospitals that has been linked to an outbreak of a drug-resistant bacterial disease and may have contributed to the deaths of two patients and the possible infection of as many as 179 others in Los Angeles. ... The patients at UCLA underwent medical procedures between October and January using a type of endoscope that is also known as duodenoscope. It is used to diagnose and treat diseases of the liver, bile ducts and pancreas, according to UCLA. (McKay and Burton, 2/19)

The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday warned doctors and hospitals that a commonly used type of medical scope can be difficult to sanitize between uses and “may facilitate the spread of deadly bacteria.” The agency’s warning came a day after news broke that seven patients had been infected by a drug-resistant “superbug” at UCLA’s Ronald Reagan Medical Center since last fall. Two of the patients died, and public health authorities are tracking down nearly 200 others who might have been exposed to the dangerous bacteria through the use of the contaminated medical scopes. (Dennis, 2/19)

The CRE germs usually strike people receiving medical care in hospitals or nursing homes, including patients on breathing machines or dependent on catheters. Healthy people are rarely, if ever, affected. But the bugs attack broadly, and the infections they cause are not limited to people with severely compromised immune systems, said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, director of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “This is exactly what we are worried about,” Dr. Frieden said of the California infections in an interview. “CRE is becoming increasingly common in hospitals around the U.S. If we aren’t careful, it may well get out into the community and make common infections, like urinary infections, and cuts potentially deadly.” (Tavernise, 2/19)

The Food and Drug Administration warned doctors and hospitals Thursday to use extra caution in disinfecting a hard-to-clean medical scope that has been linked to the spread of powerful "superbugs" in outbreaks across the country. The agency said that even meticulous cleaning of the duodenoscopes, which are used on about 500,000 patients a year, may not entirely eliminate the risk. And it advised doctors and hospitals that it is studying possible solutions, including new disinfection protocols. (Eisler and Stanglin, 2/19)

A "superbug" outbreak suspected in the deaths of two Los Angeles hospital patients is raising disturbing questions about the design of a hard-to-clean medical instrument used on more than half a million people in the U.S. every year. ... The infections may have been transmitted through two contaminated endoscopes that were used to diagnose and treat pancreatic and bile-duct problems. The instruments were found to have "embedded" infections even though they had been cleaned according to manufacturer's instructions, said Dr. Robert Cherry, the hospital's chief medical and quality officer. Five other scopes were cleared. (Chang, 2/20)

The medical device implicated in the superbug outbreak at UCLA's Ronald Reagan Medical Center has a reputation for being tough to disinfect, largely due to its unique design, doctors say. (Mohan, 2/19)

CRE superbugs are becoming more widespread in hospitals and other healthcare facilities. They can cause infections that are difficult -- or sometimes impossible -- to treat. At least seven patients at UCLA's Ronald Reagan Medical Center have been sickened with CRE infections in recent weeks, and two have died. Here's what you need to know about CRE. (Morin and Brown, 2/19)

News reports are describing a "nightmare superbug" killing people in California. But scientists who study infectious diseases say the risk from this outbreak doesn't live up to the alarming headlines. "It's not something that is likely to spread around the community or is a cause for alarm," says David Perlin, an infectious disease scientist and executive director of the Public Health Research Institute at Rutgers. (Hamilton, 2/19)

The bacterial outbreak at a Los Angeles hospital highlights shortcomings in the federal government’s efforts to avert the most lethal hospital infections, which are becoming increasingly impervious to treatment. Government efforts are hobbled, infection control experts say, by gaps in monitoring the prevalence of these germs both within hospitals and beyond. The continued overuse of antibiotics — due to over-prescription by doctors, patients’ insistence and the widespread use in animals and crops — has helped these bacteria evolve into more dangerous forms and flourish. (Rau, 2/20)

Every year at least 23,000 Americans die from bacterial infections that don’t have effective treatments, including two patients killed in a recent outbreak in a Los Angeles hospital that has spurred new attention on the issue. While public health experts say the risk from infections of drug-resistant “superbugs” has been growing, the pipeline of new antibiotics to treat them hasn’t kept pace. Doctors are forced to rely on decades-old medicines with sometimes heavy side effects to treat everything from urinary tract infections to deadly hospital-acquired bacteria such as carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, the pathogen in the Los Angeles cases. (Koons, 2/19)

The world’s best drug for treating malaria, a medicine that is the key to saving millions of lives in Africa and beyond, is losing its efficacy in a much larger swath of territory than was previously known, according to research that was released Friday. The study, in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, a medical journal, raises the troubling prospect that resistance to the drug, artemisinin, might one day severely hamper treatment of a disease that kills hundreds of thousands of people every year. (Fuller, 2/19)