PROBE SOUGHT IN LAB-TEST SCANDAL

Inmate Medical Results Found To Be Falsified

CALIFORNIA -- Calling it a potential threat to public safety, state
officials and prisoners' rights advocates called yesterday for an inquiry
into the state's apparent failure to retest thousands of prisoners after a
medical lab was found faking test results for AIDS, hepatitis and other
diseases.

The Chronicle reported that while seven state prisons were warned about the
falsified results three years ago, there is little evidence that the state
Department of Corrections made any attempt to retest inmates or notify them
that their test results were in question.

B.C.L. Clinical Labs, a Southern California firm, was shut down in 1997
after state investigators raided the laboratory and found evidence that it
was simply making up results on vital medical tests and typing them into a
computer.

The Department of Corrections still does not know how many prisoners may
have been affected by the testing fraud.

Lawmaker's Demand

"We will demand of them a full response, and request corrective actions.
(We will) continue to investigate to ensure that this very serious problem
is corrected," Assemblywoman Carole Migden, D-San Francisco, said.
"Certainly we'll insist upon greater oversight.

"This will shake up a wobbly and inconsistent department," Migden said,
criticizing the Department of Corrections -- which oversees 160,846 inmates
in the state's 33 prisons -- as "difficult to rein in."

Problems with prison health care are nothing new, said Geoff Long, chief of
staff for the Assembly's Appropriations Committee, "They just get bigger."

If the state did not follow up with new medical tests for prison inmates,
it may have serious health consequences not only for the inmates
themselves, but also for the general population, said Long, who has worked
on corrections issues for 17 years.

Without retesting, inmates could have lacked crucial information about
their health, and could have been released back into society without
knowing they had a serious or potentially contagious condition.

"The mission of the Department of Corrections is to lock people up and keep
them away from the public. They're pretty good at that. What they're not
good at is medical treatment, substance-abuse programs, things that make it
safer for the public when they get out," Long said.

"We release 100,000 of these (prisoners) a year," Long added. "They are not
out there wearing little face masks . . . If they've got hepatitis or TB,
they are spewing them around. They are out in the mall."

Liability Issue

The latest snafu with prison health care is not "particularly surprising,"
said Steve Fama, staff attorney for the Prison Law Office, a nonprofit
organization in San Rafael that provides free legal services to inmates.

"Health care in California's prisons is marked by many problems. One of the
major ones is the lack of follow up," he said.

Fama said the state's failure to retest or inform prisoners, if true, could
have serious legal implications.

The Department of Corrections medical staff could be liable for medical
malpractice, "depending upon the harm that would be suffered by the
patients," Fama said. And if the prison was "deliberately indifferent" to
these patients, "it could possibly be a civil rights violation," he said.

Prompted by The Chronicle's inquiry in March, Department of Corrections
authorities have said that they are looking into the matter, and hope to be
able to document an organized approach to retesting inmates.

Department of Corrections spokesman Bob Martinez added yesterday that
prison doctors "were professional and did whatever was necessary to verify
prognoses or concerns about patients."

Medical staff members at several prisons that contracted with B.C.L.
expressed concerns about the lab's slow response time and shoddy work. At
one facility, Chuckawala Valley State Prison, prison doctors sent some test
samples to local hospitals to be reprocessed after the doctors said they
could not rely on B.C.L. test results.

Dr. John Culton, Chuckawala's chief medical officer, told The Chronicle
that he urged state health inspectors to check out the lab and that any
prisoner whose lab results were suspect was retested at his facility.

Lack Of Written Records

However, Culton acknowledged that he never set any formal retesting program
down in writing. Department of Corrections officials have been unable to
produce evidence of a cohesive or widespread attempt to retest inmates
tested by B.C.L.

"There is no record that would absolutely document retesting," Martinez
said. "Those records don't exist."

However, Martinez said, "I'm confident that they retested, even though they
didn't set up a reporting process for that. It was done within each of the
inmate's files."

A Chronicle review of the records of more than a dozen female inmates shows
only two cases of retesting. One woman was given another HIV test 13 months
after her initial test, and another was retested for a thyroid condition
but not for other possible illnesses.

The Department of Corrections is evaluating the "appropriate protocol at
this point," Martinez said.

"I don't think it's going to be possible to retest everyone. It would be
very, very difficult to do," he said. "It's a whole lot of people. We're
talking thousands and thousands. It's a very large, decentralized operation."

E-mail Janet Wells at wellsj@sfgate.com.