Saved by doctors
Nose ring could have led to death, but woman is …
Shortly after Dana Smith woke up in a hospital bed last month, she learned she had just undergone a lifesaving liver transplant — the final step in a swift chain of events that began with a nose ring.
The 37-year-old mom from Hollis, Queens, was put into a medically induced coma soon after arriving in the emergency room Jan. 13 following a four-day bout of fatigue and nausea — signs that she had recently contracted hepatitis B and that her liver was failing.
Smith was quickly put on the transplant list. Four days later, she received a new liver at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, L.I.
But it wasn’t until after the procedure that Smith’s surgeon, Northwell Health Director of Transplantation Dr. Lewis Teperman, noticed the small stud on the side of her nose.
“He came in with his team and he asked them, ‘Do you guys notice anything about her that you didn’t notice before?’ ” Smith told the Daily News on
Wednesday.
Teperman gestured to the tiny piece of jewelry, then asked Smith how long she had had the piercing.
“I told him it was new, it’s not something I had for years,” said Smith, a Northwell Health employee who had her nose pierced Nov. 29 to celebrate her birthday.
“My health was good
otherwise. I had just gone to [the] doctor, everything was fine prior to me getting it. That was the only thing that made sense.”
The hepatitis B virus accounts for less than 5% of acute liver failure cases in the United States, Teperman told The News.
It’s difficult to say whether Smith contracted the virus from the Valley Stream, L.I., mall where she had it pierced, or if she contracted it later due to improper care of the new hole in her nostril, Teperman said.
Still, he and his colleagues believe the stud is what led to her near-fatal illness.
“This is the most likely candidate, this little nose stud that she had,” he said.
“When we saw her she had less than days to live,” he added.
Hepatitis B causes the liver to shrink and the brain to swell, leading to death, Teperman explained.
“We sent her liver to pathology … and when we looked at it, there wasn’t a single live liver cell left.
“We were very fortunate. She had less than less than a percentage point of a chance of living.”
Smith — who still has the piercing — says she often thinks of what might have happened had she waited another day to go to the hospital, or if a liver transplant wasn’t available.
“Timing really played a big role in me being here today,” she said.
“I had a lot of days where I would just cry for no reason — or from just thinking about what I went through and realizing how grateful I am to still be here.”
Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine meets government standards for emergency use authorization, the Food and Drug Administration said Wednesday, clearing a big hurdle for a third option in the fight against the pandemic.
The FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee will meet Friday to review the company’s request for emergency use authorization.
The one-shot vaccine is overall about 66% effective at preventing moderate to severe COVID-19 cases, the FDA said, with no safety concerns for patients based on age, race, ethnicity, medical co-morbidities or previous infections. The Johnson & Johnson shot is 85% effective against the most severe cases.
The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines both report rates of about 95% effectiveness.
“This is a vaccine to prevent you from going to the hospital and dying at a level that’s
certainly comparable” to those of Pfizer and Moderna, said Dr. Paul Offit, a vaccine expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and part of the FDA panel that will review the Johnson & Johnson data Friday.
The most common side effects of the vaccine were headache and fatigue, followed by muscle aches, nausea and fever. No one reported anaphylaxis, a severe allergic reaction.
The analysis released Wednesday showed virus protection began to emerge about 14 days after vaccination. But by 28 days after inoculation, there were no hospitalizations or deaths in the vaccinated group, compared with 16 hospitalizations and seven deaths among those who received a placebo.
Testing was done on 44,000 adults in the United States, Latin America and South Africa.
South Africa, which is dealing with a concerning variant spreading there, recently began giving the J&J vaccine to frontline health workers on a test basis after deciding that a vaccine from rival AstraZeneca had not shown strong enough study results against the new strain.
Johnson & Johnson said it expects to have 2 million doses of its vaccine shipped within the first week after approval, and plans to ramp up production enough to provide 20 million doses by the end of March and 100 million doses by the end of the summer.
Unlike the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, Johnson & Johnson’s version requires only a single shot and can last three months in a standard refrigerator, making storage simpler for pharmacies and clinics.
Johnson & Johnson is conducting another large study to see if a second dose of its vaccine improves effectiveness.
European regulators and the World Health Organization also are considering the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.