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

Things are starting to look somewhat bleak for GlaxoSmithKline. Of course, the definition of “bleak” takes on a different meaning when you happen to be a multibillion dollar pharmaceutical conglomerate. For you or me, “bleak” might mean facing bankruptcy, or having a relative in the hospital, or any number of serious, life changing events. For GSK, “bleak” means “only making hundreds of millions instead of billions.”

This is the sort of “bleak” that pretty much everybody we know would love to experience, but GSK doesn’t find that prospect too appealing. Their “problems” have happened as the result of their previously popular type-2 diabetes drug Avandia being linked to heart complications in people who use it.

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Saudi Arabia Suspends Sales of Diabetes Drug Avandia Due to Heart Damage Concerns

According to a story in Reuters, the Saudi Food and Drug Authority have decided to suspend the sale and use of Avandia within its borders for six months due to concerns that it might cause “adverse cardiovascular effects” in its users. The SFDA is giving Avandia manufacturers GlaxoSmithKline six months to provide them with evidence that their concerns are unwarranted.

Although Saudi Arabia is the first country to actively suspend the sale of Avandia over health concerns, they are certainly not the first to examine whether the benefits outweigh the purported dangers of the drug. The U.S. Senate Finance Committee, after studying the anti-diabetes drug for two years, came to the conclusion that not only can an estimated 83,000 heart attacks over eight years be attributed to flaws in the drug, but also that GlaxoSmithKline were aware of the added risks.

The name of the actual functioning medicine in Avandia goes under the name of Rosiglitazone. It belongs to a class of drugs that work as insulin sensitizers. What this means is that it makes people who have Type 2 diabetes more receptive to the insulin that they already have in their blood, which makes constant blood sugar monitoring unnecessary.

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Studies Refuting Avandia Heart Attack Evidence Authored By Drug Company Scientists

When the FDA released a warning about the type 2 diabetes drug Avandia in April of 2009, the premise of the warning was quite clear:

“Safety data from controlled clinical trials have shown that there is a potentially significant increase in the risk of heart attack and heart-related deaths in patients taking Avandia.”

Although the FDA did not take any steps toward removing Avandia from the shelves of the nation’s pharmacies, the fact that it was willing to admit that there was something significant about the numbers of heart attack victims among Avandia users was an important step. Equally significant (although maddeningly time consuming) is the fact that they have sent the matter to an independent advisory board for further review. The FDA is planning on holding a public hearing on Avandia heart attack claims in July.

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Washington, D.C. Attorneys Helping Victims of Broken Bones Due to Fosamax, Bisphosphenates

The human body has a natural tendency to decline with age. Sprains, aches and a lessening of mobility and agility happen to all of us. These symptoms are simply part of getting older.

One condition that often occurs in women as they get older is called osteoporosis, which causesthe thinning of bone tissue and loss of bone density over time. This means that bones are prone to fractures and breaks. It is a condition that makes life difficult for the victims, mainly because they have to begin to live their lives as if they were made of glass. Activities that were taken for granted have to be curtailed or stopped altogether because of the risk of bone injury.

The pharmaceutical giant Merck released and marketed a drug called Fosamax in order to help victims of this bone thinning condition, and several other pharmaceutical companies followed suit with similar drugs. Sonofi Aventis released and marketed a drug called Actonel and Roche released a drug called Boniva.

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 Plane crashes are taken quite seriously in this country. It doesn’t matter if the crash involved a crop dusting, single propeller plane or if it involved a 747 jumbo jet. Any time a plane goes down, agents of the National Transportation Safety Board are dispatched to the scene. They aren’t just there to clean up the wreck. They are there to examine every aspect of the crash, and one of the first things that they look for is “The Black Box.”

“The Black Box” (which is actually orange in color) is the nickname for the Flight Data Recorder, which records quite literally everything that goes on in a plane. It records cockpit conversations, air speed, height, which controls were used, what actions were taken by the crew, and every conceivable action that takes place during the course of a flight. It is this data that helps the NTSB determine whether or not the plane crashed due to an equipment malfunction, or weather conditions, or pilot error.

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Up until about a week ago, we had no idea that the Washington, D.C. subway system was the second busiest in the country. We think we can be forgiven for expressing surprise when we found this out. The car traffic in Washington, D.C. is some of the worst in the country, both in terms of gridlock and in terms of car accidents, so if you happen to spend a lot of time on the highways in Maryland, D.C. or Virginia, it would be reasonable to make the assumption that D.C. doesn’t have a busy subway system.

But we do have a subway system, and it is the second busiest, and we found this out while reading an article in the Washington Post, in which the Federal Transit Administration delivered its report on Metro safety to members of the Senate and Congress who served the D.C. metropolitan area.

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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 yaz 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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