The medical technician, who drew blood from New Hampshire Rep. Peter Schmidt after breaking his leg in February, is due to a law enacted in 2014 after a traveling medical technician infected dozens of hepatitis C patients. Technicians are registered with the state.

But by the time Schmidt got back on his feet, colleagues had hijacked his bill aimed at improving the registry. House lawmakers passed a bill last month that eliminated the registration requirement altogether, and Schmidt is now urging senators to reject it.

“Please don’t pass this, it’s a bad idea,” Schmidt said. “I think we need to keep registering these medical technologists or we’ll open the door to a potential duplication of the Exeter experience.”

New Hampshire created the Medical Technician Registration Board in response to David Kwiatkowski, who served 39 years in prison for stealing painkillers and replacing them with saline syringes contaminated with his blood.

At the time, officials wanted the board to be a model for other states, but that didn’t happen. Those who want to abandon it say it creates unnecessary bureaucracy at a time when healthcare facilities struggle to hire workers.

“The actions of a bad actor, no matter how outrageous, are not a reason to require thousands of technicians to sign up and pay,” said Rep. Carol McGuire, R-Epsom, when the House passed the bill last month.

But Linda Ficken, a Kansas woman who contracted hepatitis C from Kwiatkowski in 2011, said she believes any health care provider with access to medication should be registered and regularly tested for the drug.

“Every time I go to the hospital, I can’t help but think, is this a repeat of the same mistakes?” she said. “Cure or not, thoughts and anxiety are still there.”

Despite being repeatedly fired on drug charges, Kwiatkowski worked at 18 hospitals in seven states before being hired by Exeter Hospital in New Hampshire. After his 2012 arrest, 46 people in four states were diagnosed with the same strain of hepatitis C virus he carried, including one who died in Kansas.

In total, 32 patients were infected in New Hampshire, seven in Maryland, six in Kansas and one in Pennsylvania. Kwiatkowski has also worked in Michigan, New York, Arizona and Georgia.

The case highlights the fact that medical technicians are not as tightly regulated as nurses or doctors, and their misconduct and discipline are tracked through a national database. While some states require certain technicians to be licensed, the four states where he worked did not have any at the time of his arrest, including New Hampshire.

New Hampshire eventually created a registry for all health care workers who are not yet licensed or registered and have access to patients and medications. Hospitals must report disciplinary action to the board, which also investigates complaints and takes disciplinary action.

However, Lindsey Courtney, director of the Office of Professional Licensing and Certification, said the board had struggled to maintain a quorum and had not met for more than a year.

“We are very concerned that the state is not fulfilling its obligation to protect the public,” she told a public hearing.

Courtney, who did not take a position on removing the board, backed Schmidt’s original proposal to turn it into an advisory group to advise her office. There are currently 1,691 registered technicians, and while complaints are few, the board takes action on a handful of cases each year.

Schmidt said his goal is to shift some of the administrative burden from the board to the larger agency. He wants the Senate to either cancel the revised bill or go back to his original ideas.

While hospitals are on the front lines of preventing and responding to drug diversions, working with public health, licensing and law enforcement agencies is critical, said Dr. Matthew Christ, a medical officer at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

He said the CDC was unaware of outbreaks related to drug diversion in recent years and was cautiously optimistic because health care facilities have improved the safety of controlled drugs and many state licensing agencies have taken steps to improve cross-border State communications.

Similar outbreaks of hepatitis C had been traced to other hospital technicians in Texas, Colorado and Florida in the decade before Kwiatkowski’s arrest, and CDC officials said at the time that Kwiatkowski’s case highlighted a widespread A growing concern in the public health system.

While other states haven’t followed New Hampshire’s lead, the registry may have prevented people like Kwiatkowski from coming to the state in the first place, said Sen. Tom Sherman, who leads both parties Work hard to create a board.

Gastroenterologist Sherman, who is running for governor, played a key role in uncovering Kwiatkowski’s misconduct when he and his colleagues noticed a cluster of hepatitis C cases among their patients and realised they were all in Exeter The hospital’s cardiac catheterization laboratory was treated. He is now urging his senator colleagues to consider “the cost of doing the experiment and seeing what happens if we get rid of the board.”

“People died because of that outbreak,” he said. “It was a well thought out solution and it worked. Taking it away now means we just haven’t learned from history.”