CANCELED because of heavy snowfall in the area where the speaker lives. We will reschedule as soon as possible.

Join authors Evelyn V. McKnight and Travis T. Bennington for a fascinating part of Nebraska history that isn’t widely known - but needs to be. “A Never Event: Exposing the Largest Outbreak of Hepatitis C in the American Healthcare Industry,” reads like a page-turner detective novel, but it’s all too true, and it happened in Nebraska. Written by a survivor of the tragedy and an attorney who represented many of the victims, this is a story of recklessness, deception, and betrayal by the person these patients should have been able to trust the most: their physician, a man who, when the outbreak was discovered, fled the US for his native country in the Middle East.

In the small, farming community of Fremont, Nebraska, townspeople eagerly welcomed an acclaimed doctor as the first full-time oncologist at the new, local cancer treatment center. But the fanfare soon turned into a nightmare. During chemotherapy treatments, 857 patients who were already waging the fights of their lives against cancer were inexplicably exposed to the deadly, blood-borne hepatitis C virus. At least 99 of them contracted the lethal illness. The horror was unprecedented as this was the largest healthcare-transmitted outbreak of hepatitis C in American history, and remains so to this date.

A Never Event - a term used to describe a preventable medical tragedy - is a searing account of the health challenges these patients encountered and their quest for justice.

There will be a book signing after the presentation.

Light reception to follow. Free and open to the public.