The unsafe medical procedures that spread hepatitis C among patients at an important Las Vegas surgical clinic may actually be more widespread than investigators imagined, health officials announced Thursday.

Health inspections at 13 other outpatient clinics in the Las Vegas area revealed several violations of practices, Lisa Jones, head of the state licensing bureau, told a legislative committee on health care.

"We're finding problems at a variety of different levels — medication reuse, in some cases syringe reuse in different procedures and functions. That's why one of our very first actions is the need to get the word out on the street," Jones said, according to the Associated Press. She refused to give further detail.

Local health authorities have first shut down the Endoscopic Center of Southern Nevada, after an outbreak of hepatitis C was linked with the unsafe medical practices in the clinic. Six former patients have already been diagnosed with acute hepatitis C and nearly 40,000 former patients may have been infected with hepatitis B, C and the virus HIV.

Hepatitis is a potentially lethal, blood-borne virus that affects the liver. It can lead to fatigue, stomach pain and jaundice. It is dangerous because it is not detected in 80 percent of the cases.

Health officials think the virus was spread by the clinic’s nurses, who reused syringes and vials of anesthesia, a procedure recommended by the clinic’s manager.

The clinic’s majority owner, Dipak Desai, expressed his concern for the patients and assured them that the problems were corrected. But later, he took out a large advertisement in the Las Vegas Review Journal, insisting that there had been no such problems at the clinic and that the chances for the clinic’s patients to contract a disease were “extremely low.”