Programmatically delete term from taxonomy term from all referring term reference fields

Question

I would like to be able to programmatically delete a taxonomy term from all instances of term reference field that targets that terms vocabulary.

My reason for this is that I believe I've encountered a bug where by when I delete a taxonomy term itself, the database record for related term reference fields remains.

I've field a bug report at: http://drupal.org/node/1281114 however in the meantime before the massive drupal core machine gets around to addressing the bug, I'd like to try and solve it myself temporarily until there is a more robust and core solution.

Is there a 'correct' way to delete a taxonomy term from each instance of fields term reference using Entity API or perhaps a core function?

Thanks