One Out of Five Emergency Defibrillators Unreliable
May 18, 2006 by Lei
Filed under Diseases & Conditions
A couple of months ago, I posted about public defibrillators saving lives. While it’s true that emergency external defibrillators have saved thousands of lives, it’s also true that one in five units (about 164,000) sold in the past 10 years have been recalled or had an alert issued. A recent study also found during the same period of time that the Federal Drug Administration received “370 reports of deaths in which defibrillators or critical components malfunctioned during attempts to resuscitate patients in cardiac arrest.”
These numbers are small when considering the hundreds of millions of people living in the U.S., but if you were the one who needed the emergency defibrillator, statistics won’t matter at all. If you own or are responsible for an emergency external defibrillator, be sure to regularly check recall and alert notices online or by phone.
New York Times, May 18, 2006
Technorati Tags: defibrillators, emergency defibrillators, heart, heart disease, cardiovascular disease, heart attacks, cvd
