News Brief: Needle safety expert wins MacArthur ‘genius’ award

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Needle safety expert wins MacArthur genius’ award

Janine Jagger, PhD, MPH, whose research and advocacy brought attention to the preventable hazards posed by needle devices, has received a MacArthur Foundation award, which provides an unrestricted award of $100,000 for five years. Jagger, who is director of the International Health Care Worker Safety Center at the University of Virginia Health Sciences Center in Charlottesville, says she plans to use the funds to expand the center’s work in developing countries.

The Chicago-based MacArthur Fellows Program, often dubbed "genius grants," recognizes people in a wide range of fields who have shown uncommon creativity and had "the courage to challenge inherited orthodoxies."

Jagger, an epidemiologist, was studying air bags and brain injury in the early 1980s when she heard from health care workers that they were concerned about the risk of contracting AIDS from contaminated needles.

At the time, needlestick prevention focused exclusively on technique — an assumption that health care workers caused their own injuries by careless or improper use of the devices. Jagger developed a prototype safety device and conducted research showing that safety devices could significantly reduce needlesticks.

She established a database of needlestick information: the Exposure Prevention Information Network, or EPINet, which now has about 1,500 member hospitals. Her continued research and advocacy of safer devices ultimately led to the passage of the Needlestick Safety and Prevention Act in 2000.

Jagger did not know she was even being considered for the award when she received the phone call. "I’m speechless, just absolutely speechless," she tells Hospital Employee Health.

Jagger says she plans to use the money to fund projects in developing countries, including a plan to safely eliminate infectious medical waste.