Group of Patients Thrown into Shock by Muscle Relaxants

Out of 17 people who received skeletal muscle relaxants at a hospital, one patient died of the side effects and another 4 were put under intensive care for the same reason.

A senior woman, whose last name is Kim (73), was being treated for her degenerative arthritis at Geoje Baek Hospital in Shin-hyun Eup, Geoje City, Gyeognam Province. During the treatment, she got a 2cc intravenous injection of Ample, which is a kind of the muscle relaxant diluted in 1000cc of the glucose fluid. After the shot, she went into the coma with symptoms of high fever and severe headache. Then, at around 3:10 a.m. on October 4, 2002, she was pronounced dead.

Another 16 patients of the hospital, who received the same kind of muscle relaxant injections on the same day, showed similar symptoms and, on Oct. 3, were evacuated to larger general hospitals like Kyeongsang University’s medical center and Samsung Hospital in Masan. Of them, 3 to 4 patients were put under intensive care due to lower blood pressure and sepsis.

The injections used this time “Ample” were manufactured by a pharmacist company in Seoul, whose initial is G. It produced 32,000 injections of the relaxant in July and recently sold 1,000 of them to Geoje Baek Hospital.

The spokesperson for the hospital said, “We examined, with a microscope, the G-manufactured shots being stored. As a result, we have found out that, in some of the injections, a virus is detected, which does not like oxygen. I guess that the virus, once put in the bodies of the patients, may have caused the sepsis.”

But the company G denied, “We first started to produce this medicine in 1999. Only in August of this year, we supplied more than 10,000 Ample products to hospitals in Daegoo City and Chunam Province. But no problem has occurred. There must have been some other problems. Problems lying in the procedure for giving shots might have caused the symptoms.”

The police have confiscated the 680 units of Ample being stored at the hospital and sent them to National Institute of Scientific Investigation for examination, and on Oct. 5, decided to perform an autopsy on the dead patient to find out the cause of death. In addition, they are questioning the medical team and officials of the pharmacist company.

In the meanwhile, Korean Food and Drug Administration has embarked on its own investigation of the medicine in question, focusing on quantity, ingredients, purchasing process and storage conditions of the medical product. It will also conduct a special probe into the whole manufacturing process of the company.

The agency said, “The medicine was produced on July 26 of this year, and has been distributed nationwide. But the side effects occurred in a large group of patients only at this particular hospital. Considering those circumstances, for now, we believe that the defect lied not in the medicine itself, but in the way the hospital handled the medicine such as infection with the syringe.”

But, the agency says that the final determination can be made 3-4 days later when the results of the hospital’s culturing come out. It also says that, if it transpires that the problem is with the medicine itself, it will have the manufacturing and usage of it stopped.”

The government of Geongnam Province ordered hospitals under its jurisdiction to stop using the medicine and Geoje Baek Hospital to pack and seal it.

The skeletal muscle relaxant at issue is used for relieving waist pains and pains from arthritis.

Jeong-Hoon Kang Sang-Keun Song manman@donga.com songmoon@donga.com