“What Olympus did was outrageous,” Rep. Lieu said in a recent interview. “They jacked up the prices and made even more money off their defective scopes and then bragged about it. Have they no shame?”
Olympus spokesman Mark Miller said the emails with UCLA “represent standard business discussions within Olympus and between company personnel and customers.”
He attributed Olympus’ recent financial gains to the overall strength of the business.
“Olympus launched several new products for medical and surgical specialties during the last 12 months that were all well-received by the market and contribute to our results,” he said.
UCLA’s Dr. Muthusamy didn’t respond to a request for comment. Nor did Olympus salesmen Mr. Hernandez and Mr. Ramirez.
UCLA continues to use Olympus equipment. But after the company’s response to the outbreak it eventually turned to a rival manufacturer, Pentax Medical, for more scopes.
“Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center ordered additional scopes from Pentax in order to ensure that we had sufficient scopes to perform the necessary procedures for our patients,” said Enrique Rivero, a university spokesman. “Pentax was able to quickly provide a sufficient quantity of scopes in a timely manner, allowing us to clear our backlog of patients.”
Mr. Rivero said Dr. Muthusamy’s request for more symposium support, and Olympus’ $10,000 donation to the March 2015 gastroenterology conference, were in keeping with university policy.
Olympus recently ran afoul of federal law in regard to its sales practices companywide. This month, the device manufacturer agreed to pay a record $646-million settlement to end federal government investigations into illegal kickbacks and bribery in the United States and Latin America.
The company had courted prominent doctors and hospitals for years with millions of dollars of free equipment, cash payments, trips, and entertainment such as winery tours and balloon rides in violation of U.S. law, according to federal prosecutors. No specific institutions or hospitals were named in the federal criminal complaint filed March 1, and the practices were not confined to scopes.
“Olympus leadership acknowledges the company’s responsibility for the past conduct, which does not represent the values of Olympus or its employees,” Nacho Abia, chief executive of the Olympus Corp. of the Americas unit in Center Valley, Pa., said in a statement this month after the settlement.
Meanwhile, the deterioration in the company’s relationship with UCLA continues. Several UCLA patients or their families have sued Olympus over the infections there. Olympus responded to one of the first wrongful death cases by blaming UCLA for the outbreak.
In a Feb. 1 filing in Los Angeles federal court, Olympus said UCLA failed to clean its scopes according to the company’s protocols and to obtain available training from Olympus.
In interviews, UCLA doctors have said Olympus employees didn’t raise those concerns when they visited the hospital after the outbreak was discovered. The FDA has said infections occurred even when hospitals followed the manufacturer’s instructions.
UCLA and Olympus said they won’t comment on the pending litigation.
A recent Senate investigation linked Olympus to 19 superbug outbreaks in the U.S. and Europe from 2012 to 2015, including at UCLA and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. The report also criticized the company for failing to alert U.S. regulators and hospitals sooner about the risk of infection from its scope design.
Federal prosecutors are investigating Olympus and two other device manufacturers – Pentax and Fujifilm – over their role in the outbreaks.
This article was originally published by Kaiser Health News, a national health policy news service that is part of the nonpartisan Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Melody Petersen is a staff writer at the Los Angeles Times. Her email address is melody.petersen@latimes.com.