Dr. Robert Whitfield explains how mycobacteria can cause serious infections in plastic surgery when sterilization fails, and why immunosuppressed patients face higher risk. He cites historical outbreaks and emphasizes testing all samples for hidden infections or cancer, referencing a 2016 case his team missed.
Can you say what a mycobacteria is for listeners? It's something that a lot of people don't know about. And you can say, Dave, I don't care. Trust me, you care. So mycobacterium in plastic surgery is a very bad— So think of it, and we'll talk about how I do fat transfers later, but every year somewhere where sterilization techniques are not meeting standards, there's a mycobacterium outbreak. If everybody remembers from the AIDS crisis, Mycobacterium avium was a big problem. In patients with AIDS. So the immunosuppression can happen because of what's in the breast implant illness itself, right? I used to have suppressed immunity, and yeah, all sorts of stuff will grow during that, and then this stuff takes advantage of it. You have to have suppression in order to have this be a problem. And so I wanted to make sure that all of my samples, my client samples, were being looked at completely, both for cancer and through a microbiology lens, because you cannot have something that affects someone's long-term health by doing what I did in 2016, which miss an occult infection. And I certainly don't ever want to miss a cancer. So that, that is technically— I do the operation the same way all the time in terms of I'm trying to take it out like an undisturbed Easter egg.
