Pharmacy insider on causes of meningitis outbreak

(CBS News) A pharmacy called New England Compounding Center is under criminal investigation. Last fall, it shipped 17,000 vials of a contaminated steroid to 23 states. Hundreds of people are still fighting horrific infections caused by the drug, and patients continue to die -- the most recent just 10 days ago.

Julie Otto

We've never heard from anyone inside New England Compounding until now. A "60 Minutes" investigation has discovered how a pharmacy -- not supervised by the FDA -- came to ship toxic drugs across the country to unsuspecting patients.

"I've been in the hospital seven times, total of 75 days," says Julie Otto, one of the injured patients we met at St. Joseph Mercy Hospital outside Detroit. "I've missed Thanksgiving and Christmas and my son's birthday."

These patients were injected with the steroid to relieve chronic pain. Now, a fungus is inside them. The drug was produced by New England Compounding, known as NECC, outside Boston. Joe Connolly, a lab technician there, is the first to speak out about what happened.

This is the fungus inside patients who were injected with tainted steroids made by NECC. This sample was grown from the spinal fluid of a patient.

"The underlying factor is that the company got greedy and overextended and we got sloppy, and something happened," he says.

NECC was one of thousands of so-called compounding pharmacies. Congress exempted them from FDA oversight because, by law, they are allowed to make custom drugs just one patient at a time. But Connolly says, over a few years, NECC went national. He told us that quantities of drugs increased by a factor of 1,000.

"We became a manufacturer overnight," Connolly says. "So we were basically trying to have the best of both worlds. It was trying to manufacture without the oversight of a manufacturer. And it was just -- we all got over-taxed and everything."

New England Compounding Center blames cleaning company for meningitis outbreak FDA emphasizes compounding facilities need to be regulated Secondary infections plague meningitis outbreak patients Feds tried to close NECC a decade before meningitis outbreak

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Pharmacy insider on causes of meningitis outbreak