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Top Story

Board was warned in 2005 about nurse, but didn't bring charges

By Carol Gentry
3/14/2008 © Florida Health News

 A nurse accused of infecting 15 patients with Hepatitis C at an army hospital in Texas in 2004 was able to keep working and move on to other states – including Florida -- because the Texas agency that licenses nurses in that state did not file charges against him, according to state health officials there.  

Records at the Texas Board of Nursing show that no disciplinary action was ever taken against the nurse anesthetist, Jon Dale Jones, who was found by a team of state and federal epidemiologists to be the source of infection. Bruce Holter, spokesman for the nursing board, said Friday afternoon that he will try to find out what happened, but rejected the suggestion that the board dropped the ball.  "I can promise you that is not the case," he said.

Emily Palmer, spokeswoman for the Texas Department of State Health Services, said Friday that the agency sent a letter and report on June 24, 2005 to the board of nurses about the results of an investigation into a cluster of Hepatitis C cases at Beaumont Army Medical Center that began in the fall of 2004. While the contents of the letter and report are confidential, Palmer said, the report is the same one identified by a spokeswoman at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as the one that resulted from the CDC investigation into the Texas case.

The nursing board spokesman said that when an investigation does not lead to official charges against a licensee, the complaint remains confidential. He said he does not know whether that is what happened.

In any event,Jones left the medical center in June 2005 and eventually moved out of state, letting his Texas license lapse. He now holds licenses in Virginia, Hawaii, the District of Columbia and Florida, according to public records. He has been working at an unidentified facility in the Miami area in recent months, according to published reports. He applied for and received the Florida license last August because no negative information about him was on file with the national registry for nursing boards. Since the Texas board  had not filed charges, there had been nothing to report.

The epidemiologists from CDC, the Army's medical service and state health department -- 14 in all, along with two doctors at the Beaumont Army Medical Center -- concluded that Jones, a nurse anesthetist, transmitted the Hepatitis C virus to 15 patients at the center between June and October 2004 by matching strains of the virus in the patients to that in Jones' own body. The written account of their study was presented at an infectious disease conference in June 2005, omitting the name of the nurse and the medical center.  
 
The FBI, following an investigation of more than two years and an indictment by a federal grand jury in Texas, arrested Jones, 45, a week ago at his home in Miami, public records show. The indictment charges him with aggravated assault against three of the patients who became infected, concluding that it happened as a result of a criminal act -- theft of narcotics that were intended for the patients.
 
Civil suits that were filed in Texas but were placed on hold while the FBI investigated the case suggest that Jones used a syringe to withdraw the painkiller fentanyl, intended for post-surgery patients at the center, and injected the fentanyl in his own body. The suits theorize that the nurse then used the contaminated syringe or contents of the vial on the patients. 
 
Jones  was released on a $200,000 bond, cosigned by his wife on condition that he not work as a nurse anesthetist and stay away from narcotics, according to the Miami Herald. His attorney, Ed O’Donnell, told the Herald this week that Jones is innocent. O'Donnell has not returned calls from Florida Health News.
 
Still unclear is where Jones has been working. The Florida Department of Health doesn’t know, and spokeswoman Susan Smith said Thursday that as far as she knows the department doesn’t plan to ask. She referred questions to the Miami-Dade Health Department.
 
The director of hepatitis investigations there, Lydia Sandoval, said Friday morning that she has no information other than what has been reported in the news. She said she will send a request to the department's attorneys as well as administrators asking whether they can legally check on where Jones has been working.  She receives hundreds of positive Hepatitis C lab reports each month in addition to those for Hepatitis A and B, and has only two employees to investigate for the whole county, she said. The only way to find a cluster of suspicious new Hep C infections would be through physician reports, she said, and doctors often forget to send them.