Internal e-mails suggest that Olympus officials based in Japan attempted to hide information about potentially deadly infections linked to its duodenoscopes, according to an article on the Outpatient Survey website.
After Olympus issued a safety alert about its duodenoscopes to its European customers, U.S. executives asked whether they should also warn their customers.
The Olympus officials told the U.S. executives that issuing a global alert was "not needed" and said the problems were due to poor reprocessing by the U.S. hospitals.
Despite allegedly knowing since 2012 that design issues made the scopes nearly impossible to clean, Olympus continued blaming hospitals for the infections.
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