The Court of Special Appeals upheld the circuit court’s decision that Ritu Bhambhani, MD, was not responsible for the infection that killed patient Brenda Rozek after she received treatment for chronic arm and neck pain in 2012 at the Box Hill Surgery Center in Abingdon.
Ms. Rozek died a month after the procedure of fungal meningitis — the infection that killed 63 other patients and infected 793 more who were treated in 2012 with methylprednisolone acetate.
According to the report, the family’s attorney said that Dr. Bhambhani should have known the drug was likely contaminated because it came from the New England Compounding Center, the center that produced the infection-causing drugs. Dr. Bhambhani said she believed the drug was safe because she had used it on many patients before without incident.
The court ruled that the medicine itself was Ms. Rozek’s cause of death.
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