CNN Medical Unit Producer Trisha Henry Gaffney, center, is shown talking with three of Eddie C. Lovelace’s grandchildren, Megan Thompson, Kayla Talbott and Cory Lovelace while CNN Senior Photojournalist Greg Kilday finished taking video of the Clinton County Courthouse for a segment that first aired Sunday night on CNN.
Judge Lovelace is now believed to have been the first victim to have died after receiving injections of tainted steroids at a Nashville clinic.

The segment was filmed in Albany Friday when a crew from the Atlanta based CNN held a series of interviews with members of the Lovelace family.

Eddie C. Lovelace passed away on September 17 while hospitalized in Nashville’s Vanderbilt Hospital while being treated after suffering a stroke.

The family now thinks that a series of pain-relieving steroid injections that Lovelace had received earlier this summer to treat back pain, may have actually caused his death, as those injections are now the subject of an outbreak of meningitis.

Lovelace received the injections that are now under question in Nashville, Tennessee.

As has been reported by several media outlets in the past few weeks, including in last week’s Clinton County News, the Lovelace family is now convinced that the judge was in fact the first victim who had been treated at a St. Thomas Hospital Clinic, to die after contracting fungal meningitis from what is believed to have been tainted with a virus.

The CNN crew that worked in Albany last Friday interviewing members of the Lovelace family, included Elizabeth Cohen, who is CNN’s Senior Medical Correspondent.

Cohen, who was accompanied in Albany by producer Trisha Henry Gaffney and two CNN Photojournalists, began her CNN report with a film clip of the Lovelace family about to sit down for a meal on the family deck.

“Something is missing from the Lovelace house, five generations gather in mourning,” Cohen begins her report before giving a brief background on Judge Lovelace’s career as a politician, attorney, family man, Sunday School teacher and circuit judge.

The segment, which was repeated several times throughout the day Monday on a host of CNN news programs, included brief interview’s with three members of the immediate Lovelace family, his widow Joyce, son Chris and daughter Karen.

The segment also included a brief showing of the family gathered for the meal, as well as a short clip showing Lovelace’s mother inside the home.

Several Lovelace family photos including his grandchildren and other family members, as well as various scenes from other aspects of Lovelace’s life were shown throughout the report.

Cohen gave a detailed account of the investigation that continues into the New England Compounding Center, the firm that likely made the medicine that Lovelace received in a series of three injections.

Those medicines have since been recalled by the firm and a host of investigations have followed and are ongoing.

To date, 15 confirmed deaths have been related to the contaminated medicine, with 205 other patients confirmed as having contracted fungal meningitis.

Cohen noted that Lovelace was “a healthy 78 year-old man, worked full time and walked three miles a day,” during the opening portion of her report, which also included the on-camera interview with son Chris.

“He was the center of our universe of the family,” Chris Lovelace said, going on later to add that had the regulations controlling the manufacture and administration of drugs such as the pain relieving treatments his father had received, been more stringent and better regulations had been in place, “my father would be here today.”

Toward the end of Sunday night’s airing, Cohen also spoke with Lovelace’s daughter, Karen Talbott, noting that she was a nurse by profession.

Karen Talbott told Cohen she had been informed by the staff at Vanderbilt that the stroke suffered by her father was “strange” in that strokes in the area of the brain where his had occurred, were usually seen in patients who had suffered for years with uncontrolled hypertension, something that she said her father did not have.

Segment producer Trisha Gaffney told the Clinton County News on Friday as the team was concluding it’s final filming segment, that she had been very pleased with the interview and the information that had been gathered from the Lovelace family.

Lovelace had served in some capacity as an elected official in Albany, Clinton County and this region continuously for some 46 years at the time of his death a month ago.

A link to the original CNN segment is available at the Clinton County News website: www.clintonnews.net