CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — A lawyer for New Hampshire’s Exeter Hospital says more than two-thirds of the patients who sued after a traveling medical technician infected them with hepatitis C have settled their cases.

 

Attorney William Dailey said 10 lawsuits that remain from the original 33 are scheduled for mediation in the next few months. Any that don’t get resolved through mediation would go to trial next year.

The lawsuits seek to hold the hospital accountable for its management of David Kwiatkowski, who is serving 39 years in prison for stealing painkillers and replacing them with saline-filled syringes tainted with his blood.

Forty-six of his former patients in four states have been diagnosed with the same strain of the hepatitis C virus he carries, most of them in New Hampshire.

Kwiatkowski worked in the Hays Medical Center cardiac catheterization laboratory from May to September 2010.