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

When you consider how casually we used to use lead, it seems to be a miracle that more people weren’t killed. We used to use lead based paint. We used to put lead in our gasoline. There used to be toys made of lead. We can even remember a toy kit that was sold with lead and a miniature soldering gun that actually worked. Lead used to be used in the glass making process. Lead used to be part of practically everything we used.

In hindsight, we probably should have picked a better substance to work with, because lead is actually quite dangerous. The problem is that when you are surrounded by it, it is quite easy to ingest into your body. Lead is one of the softer metals, and it can very easily turn into dust. Particles can break away from larger pieces. And these particles can easily find their way into your food or water. And the results can be disastrous.

Lead interferes with body processes and is toxic to most of the organs in your body. And since it’s a heavy metal, once it is in your bloodstream it has a tendency to stay there. Lead can accumulate in your system over time, and the more you ingest into your body, the worse the effects can get. Heavy exposure to lead can cause severe impairment to mental development in children. At its most extreme levels, lead poisoning can kill you.

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The war in Vietnam seems occurred a long time ago. But for those who actually participated, we are willing to bet that they don’t view it as ancient history. There are still Vietnam veterans in America who have had difficulty coping with their experiences. Exposure to the extreme dangers of combat is not something that can be easily shrugged off. American soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan are proving that premise to still be true.

But the Vietnam War was different for a few reasons. Many veterans of that conflict brought back injuries that were neither psychological, nor were they of the sort that are consistent with combat. Many soldiers suffered from a disproportionately high rate of throat cancer, lung cancer, liver cancer, prostate cancer and soft tissue sarcoma. Many of them found that their wives were suffering from miscarriages, or that their children were being born with birth defects.

To be sure, these things can and do happen to many people, regardless of whether they served in Vietnam or not, but it is worth noting that among Vietnam veterans who took part in a military effort named “Operation Ranch Hand,” the numbers of cancer and birth defects is incredibly high.

Operation Ranch Hand was the name given to a military program in which chemical herbicides and defoliants were sprayed over the jungles of Vietnam. The purpose of spraying these chemicals was to remove the habitat, cover and support system of the Viet Cong, and to force them into the cities, where the Vietnamese population was generally less supportive of the guerilla forces or North Vietnam in general. Between 1962 and 1971, over 20 million gallons of herbicides were sprayed over the jungles in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

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 The only thing more impressive than the development of auto security devices is the ability of car thieves to bypass them. People who steal cars on a “professional” basis don’t view advances in car security as deterrents as much as they view them as challenges. And so far, car thieves have had much success  getting past all the various locks, alarms, gps systems, and electronic devices that were supposed to render the car “un-stealable.”

Internal steering wheel locks were supposed to make cars 100% safe, but it didn’t long for thieves to figure those out. Car alarms proved to be both easy to disable and easy to ignore, becoming such a common occurrence that the standard reaction was annoyance instead of an urge to call the police. GPS recovery units like LoJack or OnStar weren’t much of a hindrance, especially if the car thief had some knowledge of which fuses needed to be removed or where these items were normally hidden in a vehicle. And anti-theft locks like the Club, which was an external lock that fit over the steering wheel, proved vulnerable to anyone with a hacksaw or anyone with one of the commercially available “club busters” that were capable of removing the Club within 60 seconds.

The latest device that was supposed to render car thieves a thing of the past is called a “key transponder,” which is essentially a microchip in your key that has a corresponding chip in the ignition system of your car. When the key is put into the ignition, the chip sends a signal to its twin. If the two signals don’t match, the ignition system won’t turn on. And like all other car anti-theft devices, it worked right up to the point where it didn’t.

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A Message for Current and Former Mazda 3 Owners

Do you own a Mazda 3 from the model years 2004-2007? If so, you may be the owner of a faulty product. These models may have a defect that allows the doors to be unlocked simply by kicking or driving a shoulder into a section above the door handle.

This defect has left the personal property of tens of thousands of Mazda owners vulnerable to theft. Furthermore, there is evidence that Mazda knew about this defect and failed to act quickly to resolve the problem. As a result, personal property has been taken, and many cars have either been vandalized or stolen.

The Defect: The door lock mechanism in thousands of Mazdas sold in Canada has been shown to be defective. Potential thieves did not need a skeleton key or any other tool to open the door. The problem was a combination of factors, mainly involving low strength in the “skin” of the door, a lack of structural support between the door skin and the key lock barrel and door lock module, and a structural door lock design that requires a downward motion to disengage the lock. In other words, the locking mechanism was built in a way that allows the individual parts to be jarred out of alignment quite easily.

The Costs: It did not take long for thieves to figure out that this defect existed, and they began to exploit it very quickly. Police in Canada became aware that many Mazda 3’s that had been broken into had similar telltale marks over the driver-side door handle. Personal effects were stolen out of vehicles and cars were vandalized, and initially, Mazda denied that there was a problem at all. Eventually a recall was negotiated with Mazda, and while they offered free or rebated repairs to fix the problem, they still made no offer to reimburse anyone for any stolen or damaged property that was taken or vandalized specifically due to the inherent defect of the locking mechanism.

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Most of you have probably heard of the saying “Where there’s smoke there’s fire.” Maryland can now try out a new version of that old adage, which is “Where the water turns green, it’s probably Fort Detrick.”

For those of you who don’t know, Fort Detrick is a military base in Frederick County, Maryland. As of right now it is the headquarters for the United States Army Medical Research Division, but it also had the rather dubious distinction of being the headquarters for our biological weapons research during and after World War II.

The various bits of detritus that came from years of biological weapons research and years of medical research ended up being tossed unceremoniously in a few landfills on the grounds of the Fort, which resulted in the whole area being placed on the EPA’s Superfund cleanup list. This has also allegedly resulted in the immediate surrounding area being known as a “cancer cluster,” which is what you call any area where there is a higher than normal cancer rate among the residents. It turns out that waste of any kind has a tendency to seep into the soil on which it is tossed. So while the folks at Ft. Detrick might have thought that simply placing a fence around a few acres of toxic waste might be enough to keep the surrounding environment safe from pollution, it is apparent that they did not consider the effects that groundwater pollution would have on the people who live in the surrounding areas.

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Personal Injury Lawyers Who Advertise

As injury attorneys who serve the Maryland, Virginia and D.C. area, we at Greenberg and Bederman have been very fortunate in that our practice has grown exponentially since we started it in 1985, although both Roger Greenberg and Andrew Bederman have been practicing lawyers long before 1985. Greenberg & Bederman has provided thousands of injury victims in Silver Spring, Takoma Park, Alexandria, Arlington, Adams Morgan, Fairfax and all points in between with dedicated legal counsel. We have helped those who have been injured due to no fault of their own receive fair and decent compensation for their injuries, when otherwise they most likely would have received either nothing or an amount that would have been incredibly unfair.

The process of building our practice into a successful one was not something that happened over night. It took time to build a client base and establish ourselves as trusted, highly rated injury lawyers. But just under twenty five years later, we are pleased with the results of our work on behalf of the injured, and we look forward to continuing that work for the foreseeable future. We are also proud of the fact that we built our practice the right way. There are, unfortunately, some attorneys who pull out all the stops in order to get as many clients as they can, regardless of whether or not those methods fall within the boundaries of ethics or even good taste. We are proud to say that we obtain clients through smart and creative marketing, word of mouth, and reputation within the legal community, rather than using some of the more aggressive and less tasteful tactics.

Advertising: We have spots marketing our services on the radio and on television. We are willing to bet that you have seen or heard them. In these spots, we tell people what it is that we do and tell them how we might be able to help them. There are also spots that feature the testimonials of clients whom we have represented successfully. We also have a channel on YouTube, in which these spots are readily available for viewing at any time.

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The LA Times is reporting that Health Net, Inc. gave bonuses to employees based on how many policies were canceled or dropped. The state of California slapped a $1 million dollar fine on the company for this practice. Technically, the fine is not for that particular conduct. The fine is for lying to investigators about the policy on two separate occasions. In addition to the fine, the insurer has agreed to discontinue the practice.

California is currently investigating the coverage policies of 4 other companies -- Kaiser Foundation Health Plan Inc., PacifiCare Health Systems Inc., Blue Cross of California, Blue Shield of California.

This is just ANOTHER reminder that insurance companies are corporations. Corporations exist to make a profit for their shareholders. They DO NOT EXIST to help people. If so, they would be charities. Insurance companies make money by denying claims.

For a detailed review of how denying claims and/or raising premiums creates a profit see here.

To learn more about persona injury insurance issues please go to personal injury law.  To learn more about our personal injury lawyers, please click on personal injury lawyers maryland, and read the firm bios on Andrew Bederman, Roger Greenberg, or Jason Fernandez.

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