Maryland Injury and Disability Law : Washington DC Metro Injury & Disability Lawyer & Attorney : Greenberg & Bederman : Accidents, Falls, Medical Malpractice : Maryland, DC, Virginia

DC Area Yaz Birth Control Injury Law Firm Greenberg and Bederman is Currently Offering Legal Assistance

As many of you probably know, the Bayer Corporation is facing a series of lawsuits in various American states due to problems that users of their line of birth control pills are experiencing. If you don't know about yaz health problems, please read our page on yaz history.The difference between Bayer’s pills and most other oral contraceptives on the market is that Bayer’s birth control pills (which are marketed under the names Yaz, Yasmin, and a generic version called Ocella) all contain a synthetic variation of progestin called drispirenone. While the use of drispirenone has been marketed by Bayer as having some beneficial peripheral effects such as prevention of minor acne or helping to alleviate the symptoms of pre menstrual dysphoric disorder, Bayer failed to mention in either it’s marketing campaign or the warning labels used on the medication that drispirenone raises the risk of deep vein thrombosis, or blood clots in the deep arteries and veins of the legs. These blood clots can then break apart, and the pieces can travel through the bloodstream, which can cause strokes, heart attacks and pulmonary embolisms. The use of drispirenone has also lead to a higher than normal rate of gall bladder disease.

These side effects of yaz are not merely theoretical. There have been hundreds of women who have been seriously injured and hospitalized all over the country due to clot-based injuries. Otherwise perfectly healthy women have suffered from strokes, heart attacks, pulmonary embolisms and gall bladder disease, and there have even been more than fifty deaths.

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Many car accidents have causes that are based on the driver’s negligence. For instance, a driver might run a red light or run a stop sign because he was sending a text message and wasn’t paying attention. Some accidents have causes that are environmental, like when someone is driving responsibly but the car hits a patch of black ice. Other accidents involve purely random occurrences, like when a driver swerves to avoid a pedestrian or animal that has darted out onto the road.

But lately there have been a slew of accidents in this country, with some of them being fatal, and the cause has nothing to do with the driver, or the environment, or carelessness on the part of pedestrians or animals. These car accidents are taking place because of the systemic malfunction of a large number of Toyota makes and models.

The numbers of failures in crucial systems such as brakes, acceleration and steering are unprecedented. There have certainly been automotive safety recalls, but as far as we can remember, there has never been an event where multiple models from one manufacturer have experienced multiple safety failures all at the same time. A recall normally involves one problem with a few models at most. In Toyota’s case, the problems involved practically their entire line of automobiles, from hybrids to sedans to pickup trucks to SUV’s.

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GlaxoSmithKline Diabetes Drug Avandia Linked to Heart Attacks

The Conservative Political Action Conference was recently held here in Washington, D.C. The Conference was a who’s who or rising stars in the Conservative movement. Only in Washington, D.C. can you find pundits, Congressmen and columnists receiving welcomes that would normally be reserved for the likes of rock musicians and Hollywood movie stars.

While the Conservative Movement itself has various subsets and fractions, the one element that unites them in word, deed and purpose is the idea of a small, non-intrusive government. For the most part, they espouse the theory that the best sort of government is a government that does not insert itself into the free market. Good government is that which is able to function and defend its interests without a burdensome level of taxation. They would argue that the United States is not a nation of regulations and statutes, but rather a nation of people hard at work.

This is a perfectly acceptable way of looking at things. There have certainly been times when we have found ourselves wishing for smaller government. Waiting in line at the DMV, for instance, or when we have filled out our tax forms only to find out that we owe more than we thought.

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Easily Preventable Hospital Infections Kill 48,000 Patients a Year.

There are many things that can go wrong in a hospital. There are the obvious hazards, like a surgical error or a wrong or missed diagnosis. But there are also problems that stem from seemingly minor causes. For instance, let’s say some paperwork gets misfiled and a patient ends up being given the wrong medicine. Or someone doesn’t send the right form to the kitchen and a patient is given food to which he or she is allergic. Believe it or not, these aren’t “pie-in-the-sky” scenarios. They have actually happened to patients before. The only good thing that you can say about instances like these is that at least they took place in a hospital.

As long as hospitals are run by human beings, mistakes will be part and parcel of medical care. Whether the mistakes are life threatening or just a minor inconvenience is entirely up to the doctors, surgeons, nurses, pharmacists and administrators. But as attorneys who represent victims of these medical malpractice mistakes, what is profoundly aggravating to us is when people get severely hurt or even worse due to something that was completely preventable.

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There have been thousands of automotive recalls over the years. As long as cars are designed, built and driven by human beings, mistakes will always be made. If you do a quick survey of your friends and neighbors, you will probably find that more than one of them has received a postcard in the mail, or received an e-mail, or gotten a phone call from an auto manufacturer requesting that they bring their car in for a free repair.

As we have mentioned before, a lot of car recalls involve problems that are merely inconvenient. There have been recalls involving radios, heaters, paint jobs and even seat warmers. But this Toyota recall is different. In the first place, there have been several recalls involving almost every Toyota model, and in the second place, none of these recalls involve “no harm, no foul” parts of the cars. They involve accelerator pedals, brakes and steering, each of which are crucial to the safe operation of these vehicles.

And these malfunctions aren’t simply theoretical. It isn’t a matter of if your accelerator pedal sticks, or your brakes fail, or your steering stops working. It’s a question of when.

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Toyota Prius Brake Issues

Hot on the heels of the acceleration issues that have affected so many Toyota models, it now appears that there is a new problem with its most popular model. According to the Montreal Gazette, Toyota has ordered a recall of 437,000 of their Prius models. The problem appears to involve the software that controls the braking system.

Just as the Prius has two methods of acceleration (battery power for idling or low speeds in the city, traditional internal combustion for highway driving,) it also has two methods of braking. The Prius uses what is called regenerative braking at low speeds, and switches to regular hydraulic braking once the driver switches to higher speeds. Apparently there is a lag when the two braking systems switch places. According to a Toyota representative, the lag lasts between .2 and .3 seconds, but when you consider how quickly traffic accidents can occur, the time between .2 and .3 seconds can seem like a very long time indeed.

We aren’t really sure what has happened over at Toyota these past few months. It seems that there has been one problem after another, and these problems are far from simply cosmetic. So far Toyota has issued recalls on almost every model that they have available on the market. There have been recalls for gas pedals being trapped under the floor mat, gas pedals sticking in the acceleration position, and now there are issues involving the brakes. We want to reiterate that these problems are not cosmetic. These problems involve the cars either accelerating beyond control or being unable to stop, neither of which is an acceptable option.

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Congratulations to John J. Sellinger, our medical malpractice attorney, on his $2,933,500.00 verdict in a medical malpractice/wrongful death case tried in Fairfax, Virginia.   On Tuesday, February 15, 2010, a jury in Fairfax County Virginia returned a verdict of $2,933,500, in a medical malpractice wrongful death case against a radiologist for failure to identify a perforated esophagus on a Chest CT scan. The patient had presented to the Emergency Department with complaints of severe chest pain after eating a piece of meat which had become stuck in his throat. A chest CT was ordered by the emergency room physician and was read as essentially normal by the radiologist. Evidence of the perforation was not identified on the scan. Because the Chest CT was misread, the perforation of the esophagus went undiagnosed and the patient received essentially no treatment of the condition for nearly 24 hours. As a result, he became extremely ill and dehydrated. After the perforation was discovered, as the patient was being prepped for surgery, he suffered an arrest which resulted in fatal anoxic brain injury. His survivors were his wife and two adult children. Deborah Alvarez vs. Association of Alexandria Radiologists, P.C., in the Circuit Court for Fairfax County, Virginia.

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Women in Indianapolis Latest to File Yaz Lawsuits

According to the Star Press, over fifty women have filed lawsuits against the Bayer Corporation due to injuries that these women received due to the use of Bayer’s line of birth control pills.

According to the British Medical Journal Study of the women who take Yaz, Yasmin, or Oscella, 6% will experience dangerous adverse reactions ranging from blood clots, to DVT, to Gallbladder injury. Other birth control products have adverse reactions in about 1 % of patients who take birth control pills.

Bear in mind, we certainly don’t think that it’s “normal” for birth control pills to be dangerous to women. But considering that Bayer had no problem with producing, releasing and aggressively marketing a pill with an ingredient that they knew to be more dangerous than other forms of oral contraceptives, we have to assume that they think a five percent casualty rate for their products is “normal.”

The ingredient in question is a synthetic variation of one of the two main ingredients found in almost every birth control pill on the market. Most pills contain a combination of progesterone and estrogen, which essentially fools the female body into thinking that it is already pregnant. In order to separate themselves from the pack, Bayer decided to use a synthetically produced variation of progesterone called drospirenone. With this ingredient firmly in place, Bayer began to trumpet the additional peripheral benefits of what their line of pills could supposedly do. Aside from helping to prevent pregnancy, Bayer claimed that Yaz and Yasmin both helped to prevent serious forms of acne and Pre Menstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD.) They combined these claims with an expensive and flashy advertising campaign that was aimed at younger women. After all, what young woman wouldn’t want to avoid acne? What young woman wouldn’t wantto avoid the emotional instability that often comes with menstruation?

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