Articles Tagged with Personal Injury

The Association of American Medical Colleges has proposed that drug and medical device companies should be banned from offering free food, gifts, travel and ghost-writing services to doctors, staff members and students in nation’s medical colleges. The Association has begun to write a model policy governing relationships between the schools and industry. While medical schools can ignore the association’s advice, most follow its recommendations.

The rules would apply only to medical schools, but they could have enormous influence across medicine, according to medical educators.

Drug companies spend billions of dollars each year trying to influence doctors. Medical schools, with prominent professors and new trainees are attractive marketing targets.

Medical Malpractice takes many forms. In this article, we write about a unusual but dangerous medical error that can cause lifetime consequences for an innocent patient.

Though most everyone knows that sharing needles is unsafe in today’s world, sharing or reusing syringes can be equally dangerous. During any health related injection, a tiny amount of blood is often inadvertently drawn back into a syringe. Most of the time, that does not make a difference because it is common practice to use a new syringe and a new needle for subsequent injections. But in some cases, those involved may change the needle but not the syringe. They then use that syringe to draw more medicine from a vial. By doing so, the small amount of blood that may have been in the dirty syringe inadvertently flows back into the vial contaminating the entire vial.

We read recently in an article in USA Today about a lady by the name of Evelyn McKnight who has founded a patient advocacy group entitled HONOReform. Ms. McKnight apparently was infected with Hepatitis C which has caused her to be chronically fatigued and has compromised the quality of her life significantly. Apparently, she was infected with this disease when someone reused a syringe even though a clean needle was used during a chemotherapy treatment for her cancer. Quite literally, she went to a doctor to be healed but then came away with a life threatening illness. To keep that from happening elsewhere, she has founded the patient advocacy group HONOReform, that uses education and advocacy to try to stop the kind of medical errors by which blood borne diseases can be transmitted. Unfortunately for Ms. McKnight and others who have been given Hepatitis C from unclean syringes, there is no universal cure for the disease. 20% immediately develop acute infections and symptoms ranging from jaundice to fatigue, however, 75 to 85 percent may develop a chronic infection but may not exhibit symptoms for many years. Some may die of liver disease.

Our personal injury practice reflects pretty much what we see in national statistics concerning the rising rate of motorcycle injuries and accidents. We are seeing more and more clients seriously injured in motorcycle accidents. In large part, this is primarily due to increased numbers of motorcycle riders. Motorcycle registrations have more than doubled since 1997. In 2006, almost 6.5 million motorcycles were registered in this country. The good news is that the number of deaths and injuries resulting from these 6.5 million motorcycles is no greater than the number of deaths when 5 million registrations existed in 1986. The bad news is that even though motorcycles make up 2% of the vehicles on the road, they also make up close to 10% of vehicular accidents.
If you ride a motorcycle in this country, you are 37 times more likely to die in a crash than someone in a passenger car. Even though the number of motorcycle registrations have gone up dramatically, which would explain why motorcycle deaths have more than doubled in the past 10 years, motorcycle accidents kill more Americans each year than all those caused by much higher profile plane crashes, ship disasters, and railway accidents combined.
With increasing gas prices, we are likely to see a continuing rise in motorcycle usage. While many states require that motorcyclists wear helmets, in some cases, a helmet would make no difference. Nonetheless, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimated that between 1984 and 2000, 19,000 motorcyclists were saved by their helmets. These statistics are, of course, hard to quantify on a case by case basis but given the lack of protection that a motorcyclist has when involved in an accident, it seems a safe bet that helmets do matter. What matters even more, however, is motorcycle safety and rider education. Widespread motorist awareness campaigns educate the general motoring public to be aware of motorcycles. Increasing public awareness campaigns will be needed as more and more people register motorcycles in view of rising gas costs. Regrettably, our personal injury lawyers will probably continue to see a rise in the number of those that walk through our firm’s doors who have been seriously injured and/or who have had family members die as a result of their motorcycle usage. In short, the more people that ride, the more accidents that will occur and the more tragedies that will be suffered. As always, the operative watch words for motorcycle riders remains the same: Safety, Safety and Safety.

Portable defibrillators are becoming common equipment at youth athletic event. We have written in the past explaining how theses devices, also known as AEDs, help restart the heart in the event of an accident.

A recent news report relates that last month in Jacksonville, Fla. A high school lacrosse goalie was hit in the chest by a lacrosse ball causing his heart to stop beating. And, it happened again just last week at another lacrosse game in Raleigh, N.C.

Researchers say that over the last 10 years, on average, one young athlete a month has been dying because of blows to the chest which affect the heart..

Lasik vision correction surgery has been performed in the United States for almost ten years. It has become a massive business with specialized centers opening in most markets and advertising freedom from glasses. However, not everyone’s a good candidate and some suffer life-changing side effects — lost vision, dry eye, night-vision problems.

Today, the Food and Drug Administration is beginning a major new effort to see if warnings about the risks are strong enough. The FDA estimates that approximately 5 percent of patients are dissatisfied, but be more specific due to the lack of data. The FDA is now working with eye surgeons in a major study expected to enroll hundreds of Lasik patients to try to better understand who has bad outcomes and exactly what their complaints are.

About 7.6 million Americans have undergone some form of laser vision correction, including the Lasik procedure. In performing the Lasik procedure, doctors cut a flap in the cornea — the clear covering of the eye— aim a laser underneath it and zap to reshape the cornea for sharper sight.

Wal-Mart announced this week that it will soon stop selling baby bottles made with the chemical bisphenol A (BPA). The retailer said that it was immediately stopping sales of baby bottles, sippy cups, pacifiers, food containers and water bottles made with BPA in its Canadian stores. There has been speculation that Canada’s health department would soon declare the chemical unsafe.

On Monday the U.S. National Toxicology Program released a draft report that expressed concern that BPA, which is used to make plastic, could cause behavioral changes in infants and children and trigger the early onset of puberty in females.

Wal-Mart has sold BPA-free baby bottles for several years alongside bottles with the chemical. But yesterday was the first time the retailer indicated it would convert its entire U.S. stock.

An article in the New England Journal of Medicine, warns that the entry of big companies like Microsoft and Google into the field of personal health records could drastically alter the practice of clinical research and raise new challenges to the privacy of patient records.

The authors are proponents of the benefits of electronic patient records to improve care and help individuals make smarter health decisions. But their concern is that the medical profession and policymakers have not begun to understand the implications of companies like Microsoft and Google becoming the hosts for patient information in their data centers.

Today, most patient records remain within the health system. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, is the main law that regulates personal data handling and patient privacy.

Our firm concluded a wrongful death case this year on behalf of the family of a 40-year old man who was killed when a bicycle he was riding became entangled in loose utility wires which completely obstructed a city sidewalk adjacent to Peachtree Road in Atlanta. The injuries this young man received in the accident cost him his life. Subsequent thereto, our firm filed a lawsuit against the City of Atlanta for negligent maintenance of the City’s sidewalk and against two utility companies for their alleged involvement in failing to properly maintain the hazardous utility wires which obstructed the city sidewalk at the time of the incident. While the case was resolved by means of compromise, obviously, the pain from the incident still remains with the family because of the untimely and wrongful death of this young man. Notwithstanding this terrible tragedy to the family, however, as we have seen in other similar tragic cases, good can emerge from bad particularly where good people work together to accomplish common goals.
In late March of this year, a pedestrian advocacy group in Atlanta by the name of PEDS (Pedestrians Educating Driver Safety) conducted a Scavenger Utility Wire Hunt in which volunteers were asked to spread out throughout Atlanta to look for detached wires or cables that might block or obstruct city sidewalks. Thirty-five volunteers participated in this event and pictures were taken of more than 225 sites where loose or detached wires or cables blocked sidewalks. Once these pictures were in hand, PEDS digitally sent them to the City’s Department of Public Works and has asked for a meeting not only with them but also with representatives from the various utility companies that conduct business in Atlanta.
As one of the victim’s brothers stated to the press, “It’s all about accountability. If we can get the utilities and the City to take a more proactive approach to finding and fixing these dangerous sites, [my brother] will not have died in vain.” One person’s unnecessary and preventable death is one too many. Hopefully, this joint effort by volunteers pursuing a common goal can bring about good and other potential victims spared the fate suffered by our client’s family.

The Louisiana Supreme Court has ruled that a flood exclusion in an “all-risk” policy barred a claim by the owner of an apartment building damaged by flood waters during Hurricane Katrina.

The owner lived in the five-unit building when four feet of water entered the basement during the hurricane. He had a commercial “all-risk” policy and submitted a claim for the damage. An insurer’s inspector claimed most of the damage was due to poor maintenance and flooding.

The insurer paid only $230 on the claim because the policy excluded coverage for damage caused by various forms of water, including “flood.” But the policy did not specifically define the word “flood.”

This Tuesday federal regulators from the FDA urged makers of many kinds of medical devices that contain heparin to test their supplies. These concerns arise from previously discovered supplies of Chinese made heparin contaminated with a look-alike ingredient that mimicked heparin in standard tests of drug potency and purity.

The FDA announced last month that it had identified the contaminant as a modified form of a common nutritional supplement. That substance is cheaper to produce than heparin, leading to suspicions that it may have been intentionally added somewhere along a complex and lightly regulated supply chain in China.

China is the world’s leading supplier of heparin, a blood thinner often made from a substance in the intestines of pigs. It is commonly given to prevent blood clots in heart surgery and dialysis patients