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

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 yaz 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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Representative John Murtha (D-OH) Dies Due to Medical Malpractice

Being elected by ones constituents to serve in the United States Congress is certainly enough to deserve some recognition by the public. But John Murtha was one of the most effective, dynamic and controversial Representatives to ever serve on Capitol Hill.

Representative Murtha was Chairman of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, which basically means that he was in charge of determining how taxpayer money was spent on defense. It’s no secret that the United States spends an enormous amount of money on weapons and logistics for our military, and Representative Murtha was one of the key figures in charge of the purse strings.

As a result of his position, this made Representative Murtha a very influential Congressman. The United States defense budget does more than protect our nation and its interests. It also provides jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans. One congressional district might have a factory that makes one part of a jet or a tank, while another might have a company that provides defense analysis, while another might have a plant that manufactures rifle scopes.  Since there is not one Congressman on Capitol Hill who wanted to say no to federal defense spending occurring in his district, and since John Murtha was one of the men in charge of where defense dollars got spent, he had a great deal of pull in Washington, D.C.

By all accounts, he took a great deal of advantage of his position. He earned a reputation as an old school “Pork Barrel” politician, making sure that his district in Pennsylvania received a great deal of federal money. He received enormous criticism for this, but the interesting thing about “pork barrel” or “earmark” spending is that it is usually defined as “federal spending that occurs in every district except your own.” The spending that occurs in your district hardly ever comes under the same criticism as the spending that occurs in other districts.

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Most people think of Social Security as a mandatory financial safety net for Americans that is administered by the U.S. Government. The general assumption is that Social Security is there for when you retire or get past a certain working age. And while Social Security does serve that purpose, the program has other functions as well.

Social Security also exists to offer financial help to Americans who have been injured or become disabled for medical reasons and who find themselves unable to maintain any employment. This is called Social Security Disability Insurance. And just as regular Social Security provides supplemental income to older Americans  when they stop working, Social Security Disability Insurance prevents injured and disabled Americans from having no source of income because they can’t work at all. But there are some major differences between qualifying for Social Security Disability Income or Social Security Retirement Income. In order to qualify for Social Security Retirement, all you have to do is turn 65 and have paid into Social Security during your working life. Qualifying for Social Security Disability Insurance is a different matter entirely.

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 Have you been injured in Washington, D.C. because of a Toyota malfunction? Greenberg and Bederman can help.

Over the years, Toyota has developed a reputation as manufacturers of safe and dependable cars. This is why the two recalls that have occurred over the past four months have been so unusual.

In August of 2009, Toyota issued a recall of 3.8 million Toyota and Lexus models worldwide due to approximately 2000 cases of unexplained acceleration. In these instances, drivers reported their cars accelerating to speeds up to 100 mph, even while they were applying the brakes.

Toyota initially blamed the problem on improperly sized floor mats. Toyota claimed that the mats got jammed underneath the accelerator pedal and caused them to get stuck. The floor mats were replaced, but there were still incidents of acceleration problems even after the floor mats were replaced.

Toyota recently admitted that the problems went much deeper than defective floor mats, and has ordered the recall of some eight million cars worldwide. Bear in mind, car recalls happen with great frequency, and they often happen for quite mundane reasons. A faulty button on the stereo or power locks that short out on occasion are enough of a reason to bring thousands of cars back to the factory. But there is an enormous difference between a minor manufacturing error and one that causes cars to spontaneously accelerate up to 100 mph. According to the Times of London, these faulty throttles have been responsible for 19 deaths and hundreds of injuries.

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Have you suffered from physical ailments due to the use of Xenical or Alli weight loss drugs?

If so, you aren’t alone.

In August of 2009, the Food and Drug Administration announced that it would be undertaking a safety review of Xenical and Alli due to the fact that 32 reports of serious liver injury had been reported to their Adverse Reporting System. Of these 32 instances of liver injury, 26 of these victims were hospitalized, while 6 of the victims underwent liver failure.

Xenical and Alli are the commercial names for the drug Orlistat, which is a commercially available drug that is meant to help its users lose weight. Xenical contains a heavier dose of the drug and is only available with a prescription, while Alli contains about half as much of the dose of Orlistat as Xenical, and is therefore available as an over the counter purchase.

Orlistat works by inhibiting the enzymes that absorb fat from the food that you eat. It essentially makes practically all of the food you eat low fat, regardless of whether or not it was that way when you ate it initially. The fat that is not digested is excreted through the gastro intestinal tract. With Xenical, about 30% of the dietary fat that is eaten is not digested, while with Alli that number drops to around 25%.

The more obvious (and disturbing) side effects of Orlistat involve the sort that you would expect with a drug that directly affects what you digest and what you don’t. There have been reports of incontinence, oily stools, difficulty controlling bowel movements, an increased number of bowel movements, loose stools, or gas with oily spotting. These are the basic unpleasant side effects that initially led the group Public Citizen to call for it to be taken off the shelves here. Public Citizen also released a study which shows that Orlistat significantly increases the incidence of aberrant crypt foci, which are known to be precursors to colon cancer.

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