HEART pacemakers can become infected, which means that some patients must
undergo potentially fatal surgery to have them removed. Now a new coating for
pacemaker wires should allow them to be removed more easily, say its inventors,
making the operations far safer.
Pacemakers are implanted just below the collarbone, but the wires from them
that monitor heartbeat must be passed through the veins to the heart. “The main
problem is if you get an infection the wires are a direct route to the heart,
and that’s not good news,” says Lee Lewis of the National Heart and Lung
Institute at…
