It’s happened again. Patients going in for care have ended up with a deadly disease because of improper medical procedures. This time, at least six patients were diagnosed with Hepatitis C after undergoing colonoscopies at Veterans Administration hospitals in Tennessee, Miami and Georgia. All three sites failed to properly sterilize equipment between treatments, according to this USA Today article. Thousands have been warned about the risk.

Last spring, nearly 40,000 people were alerted that they should be tested for hepatitis C, along with hepatitis B and HIV after reports that a Las Vegas clinic had been reusing syringes and vials of medication for nearly four years. In 2007, a Long Island anesthesiologist at a pain clinic re-used syringes and also exposed people to such blood-borne diseases.

After last year’s Las Vegas incident, state Assemblyman Kenneth Zebrowski, D-New City and state Sen. Thomas Morahan, R-New City, introduced a bundle of bills that, among other things, strengthens the charges for those who infect patients with communicable diseases through reckless conduct.

His father, the late state Assemblyman P. Kenneth Zebrowski, had contracted Hepatitis C from a blood transfusion in the early 1970s. It wasn’t detected for more than two decades.  “My dad’s case is all too typical,” the younger Zebrowski told to the Editorial Board last year.

This news that VA medical facilities had not performed basic sterilization of equipment—and protected patients—is just heartbreaking.