Weeks after it emerged that a trio of thieves stole hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of colonoscopes from a Philadelphia hospital, another medical center said a similar theft happened to them.
The two colonoscopes stolen from Nazareth Hospital are valued at around $24,000 each, said Christy McCabe, the Director of Marketing and Communications at Mercy Health Systems, which oversees the hospital.
Both were stolen within the last three weeks from a locked cabinet, McCabe said.
That timeframe coincides with a similar theft at Lankenau Medical Center. In that robbery, two men and a woman were caught on surveillance video making off with what police said were several Olympus colonoscopes worth approximately $450,000.
Unlike with the Lankenau thefts, the ones at Nazareth were not caught on camera, McCabe said. However, an internal investigation is ongoing to see if they can determine who was responsible, she added.
The Hospital and Healthsystem Association of Pennsylvania's emergency preparedness team is notifying all state hospitals about the rash of colonoscope thefts, said HAP spokeswoman Julie Kissinger.
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Though it's unclear what the thieves plan to do with the medical equipment, a healthy market exists for second-hand colonoscopes on eBay.
"This is not something that a typical pawn shop might accept," Lower Merion Police Detective Sergeant Michael Vice told NBC10 after the Lankenau thefts. "My feeling would be that it was some type of black market sales."
