Doctors already knew about faulty hips

SIR – Knowing the integrity of The Sunday Telegraph, I became duly alarmed by your report (“Health warning over hip implants”, January 29) on the health scare concerning metalon-metal hip replacements.

Was I one of the 30,000 Britons in danger of being slowly poisoned? There was only one way to find out – except that readers like me were jamming the phone lines of hospitals up and down the country.

Eventually I got through to a hospital, to be told by an overworked staff member that this story had taken two years to surface. They have known all about it during that time and have already recalled 500 patients for examination.

Having double-checked my own case, they assured me that I was not in the metal-on-metal category and could therefore rest in peace, so to speak.

I suppose the medical world wished to keep it as quiet as possible to avoid panic, in the hope that they could quickly solve the problem. That does not seem to have happened. So it raises once again the question of just how soon the public deserved to know. Jack Webster Glasgow SIR – Your report will have been a great worry to many elderly patients with hip implants and may give the Government an excuse to limit hip replacement surgery if it is believed to have such a poor outcome.

But hip operations can achieve a success rate of 97 per cent. Metal-on-metal implants are a small proportion of the total number of hip implants inserted in Britain and many patients can look forward to more than 20 years of pain-free walking with a standard implant if the operation is carried out properly and for the right indications.

This latest disaster underlines the need for regular follow-ups for all patients with implants, and for a joint registry to spot signs of early failure. The latter is now in place. Chris Faux FRCS Chairman, The John Charnley Trust Preston, Lancashire