Family members of a patient who died at Duke University Health System filed a lawsuit against DUHS last month regarding an alleged transfusion of the wrong blood type, The Raleigh News and Observer reported Saturday.
Gene Edward Harrell, who suffered from non-Hodgkins lymphoma, came to DUHS for treatment in March 2005. He had a severe reaction to the erroneous transfusion-preventing a stem cell transplant to treat the disease-and later died in January 2006, the lawsuit states.
According to the suit, Harrell's cancer rapidly progressed without the stem cell treatment, leading to his death.
Neither Harrell's son, who filed the lawsuit, nor representatives of DUHS could be reached for comment Sunday.
The lawsuit comes four years after the transplantation of a heart and lungs of the incorrect blood type into 17-year-old Jessica Santillan, who died after the procedures in 2003. The Santillan case prompted an array of safety reviews and policy changes by DUHS to prevent similar errors.
According to the American Red Cross, human error in the transfusion process leads to thousands of mistakes across the nation each year.
Mismatches in which patients receive the wrong blood types occur in one of 14,000 transfusions, often when the blood is incorrectly labeled or the label is misread, according to the Red Cross.
Duke is currently exploring new bar-coding technology to encode blood type information into the bar codes on patients' identification bracelets, The N&O reported.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
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