4857 objects left in patients last 20 years in U.S.

I was listening to a Doctor on NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams speak about this. The question was, "How can this happen?" The answer was that the most often left object in a patient is a sponge used to sop up the excess blood during a surgery. So, it gets lost in the bloodiness of the operation sometimes in between organs. And this is a problem because it would be more difficult to see and more likely to eventually cause an infection than a scalpel or scissors. Though other problems could occur with scalpels or scissors as one moved around, bent down or had sex or something like that that could also be fatal. But at least the scalpel or scissors could easily be spotted IF you had an x-ray.

Maybe if you have surgery a good idea might be to have an x-ray of that area afterwards to make sure nothing metal was left inside you. But I don't know if sponges would show up at all on an x-ray and they might be more likely to cause an infection because of all the blood they would contain and possibly the inability of a body to get at and to remove the blood particles from inside the sponge.