Steroid injections are free of contamination at St. Luke Community Healthcare

RONAN — Recent national news stories about meningitis deaths from steroid injections have raised the question of how safe the drugs may be here in the local area.

Greg Weller, pharmacist at St. Luke Community Healthcare, reassures that none of the steroid injections available for patients at the Ronan hospital comes from the companies that have been tied to the deadly outbreak.

“We want to assure everyone that our sources for the drugs have no affiliation with the New England Compounding Center (NECC), Ameridose LLC, or Alaunus Pharmaceutical, LLC,” says Weller. “In addition, our source for compounded sterile preparations, PharMEDium™, does not compound steroid preparations and that the company’s compounded sterile preparations are not involved or implicated in the meningitis outbreak.”

The head of the St. Luke Pharmacy department says that the facility is free of any of the product that was distributed from the Massachusetts based company that has been tied to the outbreak. He adds, “We get only commercially produced products from licensed pharmaceutical companies that are regularly inspected by the FDA.”

St. Luke Chief Executive Officer, Shane Roberts, says, “It has always been a top priority for us to deliver quality healthcare in a safe environment so that our patients need never worry about any aspect of the healthcare they receive. It’s a cornerstone for any community-owned institution such as ours. Therefore, we will always stand by the promise to keep our patients our #1 focus.”