New York – At least one New York City hospital is denying charges that it is purposely underreporting the number of cases in which infants are contracting herpes during the rite of metzitzah b’peh.
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The Jewish Daily FORWARD (http://bit.ly/XYdFUZ) is reporting that a representative from Maimonides Hospital in Brooklyn strongly denied the charges brought about by Rabbi Hershel Schachter, rosh yeshiva at Yeshiva University’s Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary.
Rabbi Schachter, whose daughter works as a nurse at New York Presbyterian, issued the allegations at a lecture in London in February 2013.
In his comments, Schachter charged that three local area hospitals; New York Presbyterian, Columbia University Medical Center, and Maimonides Hospital were all complicit in the practice of underreporting cases out fear that they would lose business.
Seriously, I thought this issue was dead already…C’mon, put it to rest!!!
Uninformed Jewish orthodox are looking for facts about metzitza bepah.The facts are that many uncircumcised babies contact herpes perhaps by nurses in hospitals as well. The government can’t account for herpes in children who are are not circumcised. The question remains are orthodox babies contacted more herpes then the public at large. I believe this statistic will resolve if metzitza is dangerous or not. Can anyone post ststistics
Maimonodes Hospital in Brooklyn has Very Strong ties with the Jewish Community. So I don’t believe it.
They probably WOULD lose business, but they would be saving our kinders’ lives. Which is more important? To save a Jewish life or to have more gelt in the coffers?
@all: check out
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6122a2.htm?s_cid=mm6122a2_w
An interesting allegation against those hospitals.
*Highly* unlikely. When there is a diagnosis of HSV, too many people in the hospital know. To think that there would be an order to NOT call the Dept of Health so “keep it quiet” is absurd. The doctors & nurses involved would be violating their professional ethics (and the law) and have little incentive to cover it up (not all of them get paid directly by the patients). If a hospital administrator ever asked them to cover up the cases, wow!, the phones & pagers of the Directors of Medicine, Nursing, Pediatrics, Infectious Diseases, Risk Management, and the CEO would all light up.