SPOKANE — The Spokane Regional Health District has launched an internal review about why it failed for a month to issue a warning to cocaine users about the possible contamination of a large batch of the illegal drug.
Cocaine has turned up in the region contaminated with a drug called levamisole, which is used to deworm pigs and other farm animals. In humans, the drug causes users to lose their ability to fight infection.
The Seattle-King County Health Department this week warned drug users about the contamination after at least three people were hospitalized with life-threatening illnesses.
The Spokane Regional Health District issued a similar warning Thursday, but Dr. Joel McCullough, the district’s new director, wants to know why it wasn’t issued last month.
“We need to do better,” McCullough told The Spokesman-Review.
How the drug came to be mixed with cocaine is a mystery, he said.
Levamisole causes people to lose white blood cells, decreasing their ability to fight infection. Symptoms include high fever, chills, swollen glands, oral and anal sores, and a white coating of the mouth and tongue.
The internal review was prompted by a case that Dr. Jeremy Graham of Spokane began investigating two years ago. A woman in her mid-40s made repeated hospital visits and each time she had two common issues: low white blood-cell counts and positive tests for cocaine. Doctors were stumped at the cause.
Last year, the woman was transferred to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, where specialists attempted to help her severe and worsening rashes with skin grafts and other treatments.
The efforts failed, and the woman died.
The case continued to bother Graham. He tried to collect urine samples from cocaine users, but found they had little interest in participating.
In March, he read an article in the Annals of Internal Medicine written by researchers from the University of Alberta in Edmonton.
The article reported that 30 percent of the cocaine seized by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency during the summer of 2008 was contaminated with levamisole.
The findings, Graham said, suggested the answer to what had killed the woman.
Graham called the health district regarding the published research and his concerns that others may have been be in danger.
Based on those warnings, the district tried to notify recipients of its needle-exchange program of the danger. But the formal notification of a public health advisory to alert the medical community, media and others was not issued until McCullough who started in late April, was advised Thursday.
Information from: The Spokesman-Review, www.spokesman.com
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