Kill Shot
A Shadow Industry, a Deadly Disease
-
-
4.5 • 10 Ratings
-
-
- $6.99
Publisher Description
An award-winning investigative journalist's horrifying true crime story of America's deadliest drug contamination outbreak and the greed and deception that fueled it.
Two pharmacists sit in a Boston courtroom accused of murder. The weapon: the fungus Exserohilum rostratum. The death count: 100 and rising. Kill Shot is the story of their hubris and fraud, discovered by a team of medical detectives who raced against the clock to hunt the killers and the fungal meningitis they'd unleashed.
"Bloodthirsty" is how doctors described the fungal microbe that contaminated thousands of drug vials produced by the New England Compounding Center (NECC). Though NECC chief Barry Cadden called his company the "Ferrari of Compounders," it was a slapdash operation of unqualified staff, mold-ridden lab surfaces, and hastily made medications that were injected into approximately 14,000 people. Once inside some of its human hosts, the fungus traveled through the tough tissue around the spine and wormed upward to the "deep brain," our control center for balance, breath, and the vital motor functions of life.
Now, investigative journalist Jason Dearen turns a spotlight on this tragedy--the victims, the heroes, and the perpetrators--and the legal loopholes that allowed it to occur. Kill Shot forces a powerful but unchecked industry out of the shadows.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this sobering debut, investigative journalist Dearen charts the 2012 fungal meningitis outbreak that killed 100 people across America. Barry Cadden was the corrupt president of the New England Compounding Center, a company that created drugs for individual patients per doctor prescriptions. By taking illegal shortcuts, putting fake names on fake prescriptions, and selling mass amounts to hospitals and pain clinics, he was able to take the company from $5 million in profits to $50 million in under a decade. In 2012, NECC shipped 17,675 vials of an infected steroid to 23 states. The steroid was mostly used for patients with back pain and injected into the spinal cord. There the fungus would grow and cause devastating symptoms and usually death. As the CDC raced to find the cause of the outbreak, Cadden lied to investigators and was later charged, along with the company's chief pharmacist, with racketeering and murder by the U.S. Attorney's office. They were convicted of racketeering but not murder, with Cadden getting a nine year sentence, and the chief pharmacist eight. Dearen lays out the facts in straightforward prose. This detailed account of how greed led to widespread suffering and death grips to the end.
