Cell Phone Dangers

Posted on June 3, 2011 by Greenberg & Bederman

 

The internet is currently very much buzzing with a story about cell phone use. More specifically, the story seems to be about a suspected link between heavy cell phone use and cancer.

According to a panel of experts who reported to the World Health Organization, there is a suspected increased risk for giloma, a quite malignant form of brain cancer.

The end result was the World Health Organization put cell phone use in the same category as gasoline exhaust and DDT, a pesticide known to have some health risks. Also mentioned in the report is a specific risk to children, mainly due to the fact that their skulls are thinner and provide less of a buffer between the radiation emitted from the cell phones and the brain. This bit of news might make you want to rethink purchasing your ten year old a new iPhone.

So what are we to make of all this? Are we all carrying the equivalent of miniature Chernobyl’s in our pockets and purses? Is this asbestos all over again? Is it serious radiation, or is it the sort that you get from microwave ovens? Should we compare talking on the phone to lying in a tanning bed for an hour a week?

 

It’s hard to say for sure. But considering that about 2/3rds of the population uses a cell phone on a regular basis, and has done so for almost a generation now, surely we would have all noticed if these things were particularly toxic and dangerous to our health. In fact, there was a recent study from the University of Manchester which states that while there was in fact an increase in brain cancer as cell phone use has gone up, the increase over that particular period of time was about .6 cases per 100,000 people per year.

That’s notable, to be sure, but it doesn’t seem to be an epidemic. Too much of anything can be bad for you. Consider the case of the woman who died after drinking too much water. Or for that matter, consider the spokesperson for Heart Attack Grill, who did in fact die of a heart attack. Overindulgence in water, alcohol or a fatty food is, in all probability, a much faster way to harm yourself than cell phone use.

Don’t get us wrong. We will certainly keep an eye on the dangers of cell phone use as it develops. But, the radiation dangers of cell phones are pretty far down the list in terms of ways that they can hurt people. While radiation and cancer are certainly nothing to scoff at, the danger of getting hit by a half ton vehicle moving at thirty miles an hour is certainly more immediate. And considering how many people in America think nothing of sending a text message on their phone while driving, that particular danger is much more real than getting a tumor from cell phone use.

According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, 5,474 people were killed in 2009 due to distracted driving. By the standards of DOT, distracted driving can occur in three ways. There is visual distraction, which is what happens when you take your eyes off the road. There is manual distraction, which is what happens when you take one or more hands off the wheel. And there is cognitive distraction, which is what happens when you let your attention wander. Texting while driving is one of the rare forms of distracted driving that manages to hit visual, manual and cognitive distraction all at the same time. And anyone who has a teenager or a child in his or her twenties knows perfectly well how much texting is going on. If the 5,474 people who got killed because of distracted driving doesn’t show the dangers of texting while driving, then maybe the half a million who got injured might make it a little more clear.

So while we aren’t completely discounting the idea that cell phones might cause cancer, we are thinking that the real threat to the health and safety of others is not necessarily the phones, but rather those who use them irresponsibly. Whatever message or piece of information that you need to send, we are sure that it can wait until you either get to your destination or at least can pull over to the side of the road. Please don’t text and drive.

Greenberg and Bederman is a car accident injury law firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland. We are currently offering legal assistance to people in Virginia, Maryland and D.C. who have been injured due to the actions of other drivers. This includes people who have been hurt due to someone texting while driving. If you or a loved one in the Washington, D.C. area has been injured due to a distracted driver, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free consultation.
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FBI Drunk Driving Leads To Fatal Auto Accident in MD

Posted on February 24, 2011 by Greenberg & Bederman

 

Law enforcement officers are supposed to be held to a higher standard than the rest of us. There are a few very good reasons for this. The first is that they are supposed to be the people who enforce the laws of our cities, counties and states. The second is that they are the only people in the country who have the right to take our freedom away from us. Administrative assistants can’t serve a warrant for your arrest. Restaurant employees can’t search you for drugs or weapons. Doctors and nurses can’t lead you away in handcuffs. The only people who can do any of those things are police or federal agents. If the police and agents are in charge of enforcing the law, then should also strictly adhere to the law. The obvious premise is that law enforcement officers are not supposed to break the law. It goes without saying that the rest of us aren’t supposed to either, but if those who are supposed to enforce the laws feel no compunction about violating those laws, it means that some laws don’t apply to some citizens, which renders the whole concept of law essentially meaningless.

 

One branch of law enforcement that is held to a particularly high standard is the FBI, which basically functions as our national investigative police force. They investigate bank robberies, terrorism, financial fraud, forgeries, kidnapping, or any crime that occurs over multiple states. It takes a lot more than standard police training to be able to join.

We were recently very shocked to learn about the following incident, particularly because it involves an FBI agent breaking the very law that he is supposed to uphold and enforce:

WASHINGTON - Law enforcement officials have identified the FBI agent suspected in a fatal drunk driving car crash in Brandywine, Md. Monday night as 37-year-old Adrian Norbell Johnson. The FBI says the agent has worked for the bureau for six years…Law enforcement sources tell FOX 5 Johnson's blood alcohol level shortly after the deadly crash was .25, three times the legal limit in Maryland. Prince George's County Police say that amount of alcohol in a driver's system is extremely dangerous.

Speaking as attorneys who help victims of drunk drivers, we can tell you  that a .25 blood alcohol level goes beyond “extremely dangerous” and veers right into “extremely reckless.” He would have had to consume at least 10 drinks in order to get to that level of drunkenness, and considering that the job of most law enforcement officers is to prevent people from drinking and driving, he must have known that drinking that much and then getting behind the wheel was both illegal and completely negligent. But he did it anyway.

If Agent Johnson had been pulled over by another police officer or got arrested at a sobriety checkpoint, this might have just been an unfortunate and embarrassing incident for the FBI. Instead it turned out to be an accident where one person died and another was left in critical care in the hospital. So this incident has turned out to be both a tragedy and an embarrassment, especially considering that Agent Johnson was meant to join the security detail for the Attorney General.

Drunk driving is a serious problem in this country, particularly in the Washington, D.C. area. There were 243 DUI fatalities in Virginia last year, 10 in the District, and 162 in Maryland. And the DUI accidents where people were injured numbers in the thousands. The cost of these accidents ranges in the tens of millions. Drinking and driving is a detriment to the safety of our society, and it is one that could be easily avoided if everyone simply exercised some basic responsibility.

There is a big difference between a run of the mill car accident and an accident that is caused by drunk driving. An accident can happen to anyone. But drunk driving is negligent behavior that is often the primary cause of an auto accident. You can’t blame a driver if a deer runs out in front of his car, but you can blame a driver if he drinks ten vodka tonics, and then attempts to drive home. Agent Johnson should have certainly known this, and why he decided to risk driving home after drinking that much is beyond us.

Greenberg and Bederman is a personal injury law firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland. We are currently helping people who have been injured in car accidents due to the negligence of drunk drivers. We can help anyone in Maryland, Virginia or Washington, D.C. If you or a loved one has been injured in a drunk driving car accident, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free accident legal consultation.
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Aggressive Driving in DC

Posted on February 15, 2011 by Greenberg & Bederman

 

We occasionally read the blog Greater Greater Washington,mainly because we agree with much of its overall premise. The contributors are all very much in favor of smart city planning and development. What this means is that rather than having a dysfunctional city center surrounded by increasingly sprawling and resource wasting suburbs, it would seem to be a better idea to develop cities that manage to have efficient public transportation and easy access for bicyclists and pedestrians. Generally speaking, if there is an issue that involves urban planning in the D.C. area, Greater Greater Washington usually has a pretty smart take on it.

But it isn’t always the nuts and bolts of zoning board meetings or whether or not streetcars in D.C. would be a good idea. Occasionally you get something that is a lot more commonplace and every day, but goes a long way towards reminding you how easy it is to make your life and the lives of those around you safer.

For instance, a reader recently sent in an e-mail to the blog, and the gist of it was that a construction project in Northwest is occasionally blocking traffic in the area of E Street and 20th. This block in the flow of traffic is not constant, but it happens often enough during the course of the day that those who live and work nearby are noticing a fairly high rate of honking horns and yelling drivers and drivers behaving aggressively. Granted, this is Washington, D.C, and punctuality means a great deal here. But what this e-mail brought home to us as car accident attorneys is that being somewhere on time is not worth your life. Nor is the road the place to settle minor and temporary grievances, particularly when you are behind the wheel of a vehicle that weighs thousands of pounds.

 

Since we have been practicing injury law in D.C, Maryland and Virginia, we have had more than a few cases where somebody got hurt due to somebody losing their cool behind the wheel. The media takes the more dramatic examples of these cases and calls them “road rage,” but actually, a lot of these cases stem from something minor. A driver is behind another car that isn’t going fast enough. Someone doesn’t go immediately after the light turns green. A driver thinks, “Oh, you cut me off? Well, let’s see if you like it when I cut you off!”

It is very easy to think of your car as not being connected to the real world, especially nowadays. What with cruise control, immaculate suspension, anti-lock brakes, windows that filter out practically all outside noise, GPS devices, iPods, television screens and satellite radio, it is quite easy to forget that you are travelling at a high rate of speed in a vehicle that can weigh anywhere from 2500 pound to a half ton. If everything about your car is easy and convenient, it isn’t that much of a stretch for you to imagine that the world outside of your car should be that way too. But the real world is very rarely easy and convenient.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, aggressive driving leads to deaths in all 50 states every year. Of the 6,800,000 crashes that occur every year, a “substantial number” are believed to be caused by aggressive and angry driving. So if you happen to be in a situation on the road where your patience is being tested, try to imagine what your life would be like if you decide to make up for lost time and get somebody hurt, or worse. Or if you decided that you have had about enough of that person driving slowly in front of you and did something to cause an accident? Believe us; we have represented enough car accident injury victims to tell you that aggressive driving is not worth it.

Greenberg and Bederman is a car accident injury law firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland. We have offered legal assistance to those in Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C. who have been hurt in car crashes due to no fault of their own. If you or a loved one has been injured due to the aggressive or negligent actions of another driver, contact Greenberg and Bederman for a free legal consultation today.

 
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Virignia Drunk Driving Accident Sentenced - Barely

Posted on July 8, 2010 by Greenberg & Bederman

 

This story comes from WAVY down in Virginia Beach:

A 24-year-old woman who seriously injured two people in a drunk driving head-on collision in March 2009 was sentenced Wednesday to serve four years and six months in prison.

Lisa Marie Schettler, a Virginia Beach native, had a blood alcohol level of .44 that night in March. With that much alcohol in your system, you shouldn’t even be allowed to leave the house, much less get behind the wheel of a car. Yet that’s exactly what Ms. Schettler did. Her car drifted across the double yellow line on Bird Neck Road and slammed directly into the front of another car, which was occupied by Donald and Elaine Gay. According to the news report, all three of them were seriously injured.

Ms. Schettler is lucky that there were only injuries involved, and it’s hard to imagine that the Gay’s feel lucky at all, although they should count themselves lucky to be alive. What you had here was just about the purest form of vehicular negligence that exists. It’s dangerous enough to drink even a minor amount of alcohol and then get behind the wheel of a car; Ms. Schettler drank enough to the point where she shouldn’t have been able to see straight.

The news report doesn’t say anything about Ms. Schettler’s weight, but with a BAC of .44, we could make a fair guess that she had at least nine drinks, which is more than enough to impair someone’s ability to drive a car.

So as a result of this act of irresponsibility, two completely innocent people were badly injured. They went through painful and expensive medical treatment, they were unable to go to work and earn a living for themselves, and they had to go through a prolonged and painful recuperation process. And all they did to deserve this ordeal was to simply get in their car.

If you take the numbers available for drunk driving related accidents in Virginia as a whole, you actually get somewhat of an encouraging scenario. The earliest numbers available at the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles are from 1984, when the Old Dominion had a staggering 19,371 alcohol related vehicle accidents. This was 15.7% of all vehicle crashes. In other words, if you got into a car wreck in Virginia in 1984, there was just under a 16% chance that the other driver had been drinking.

Things have improved drastically over the following 26 years. In 2009, the total number of alcohol related crashes was 9,366, which is almost exactly 10,000 less alcohol related crashes in Virginia. We can take that to mean that raising awareness of the dangers of drunken driving and increasing the penalties for drunken driving have made a difference in Virginia. But sadly, the awareness in Virginia didn’t make enough a difference to stop Lisa Marie Schettler from getting behind the wheel of a car after nine drinks and a blood alcohol content of .44.

The definition of negligence is when one person or party does not live up to the reasonable expectations of keeping someone else from getting hurt. For instance, if you are in possession of a loaded gun, you would not fire it in public for no apparent reason. Similarly, if you have been drinking a large volume of alcohol, you would not get behind the wheel of a car. You can’t make the argument that you didn’t know that drinking and driving was illegal. You can’t make the argument that you didn’t plan on hurting anybody. A person who drinks and drives is a perfect example of someone engaging in negligent behavior.

As injury attorneys based in the Washington, D.C. area, Virginia is right in our back yard. In our twenty five years as an injury law firm, we have represented countless Virginians who were injured due to the negligence of another driver. So even though Virginia Beach is a few hours away from our offices in Silver Spring, the story of Ms. Schettler and Mr. and Mrs. Gay caught our attention.

We have dedicated a significant portion of our practice to helping car accident victims in Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C. get fair compensation when they get injured due to no fault of their own, and that includes people who have been injured due to drunk drivers. We help our clients get past the artificially low settlement offers and delaying tactics that insurance companies use to avoid paying injury victims what they deserve. If you or a loved one has been injured in a car accident in Virginia, Maryland or Washington, D.C. and you feel that you need legal counsel, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free accident injury consultation.

To learn more about auto accidents and auto injury, please read our auto accident page, or our injury page, or watch our accident videos on Youtube.
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