Current Events

New research presented this week at the American Thoracic Society’s annual meeting suggests that the ongoing opioid crisis is making waves across the country’s intensive care units (ICU) every bit as much as it is inside people’s homes.

The authors analyzed hospital admissions from 2011 to 2015 for adults over the age of 18 in a nationwide healthcare system, Vizient, Inc. Out of 272 hospitals, there were 17.6 million admissions throughout the study period, with 41,369 related to an opioid overdose. While that figure may seem miniscule in the grand scheme of things, the rate of opioid-related admissions has steadily increased 42 percent since 2009.
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Eating potatoes four or more times a week may increase the risk for high blood pressure, a large new study has found.

Researchers pooled results from three observational studies involving 187,453 men and women followed for more than 25 years. The participants returned health and diet questionnaires every two years, including whether a doctor had diagnosed hypertension. The study is in BMJ.

After controlling for body mass index, physical activity, smoking and other factors, they found that compared to eating potatoes only once a month, having one potato — baked, boiled or mashed — four to six times a week increased the risk for hypertension by 11 percent.
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DETROIT -- The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is extending its oversight of General Motors' safety practices for another year as part of a sweeping consent order signed in 2014 when the company issued a broad recall of cars for faulty ignition switches.

Paul Hemmersbaugh, chief counsel at NHTSA, said Tuesday that the agency unilaterally extended the order for a third and final year and that terms of the oversight won't change. He was a panelist at Crain’s General & In-House Counsel Summit here on Tuesday.

GM, Hemmersbaugh said, thought it was appropriate to have another year of oversight.

“It isn’t that GM has done anything in particular that is to warrant this, it’s just that they think it’s productive, too, and so we’ve extended it for a year,” he said.
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A National Transportation Safety Board report about an Amtrak train accident last year in Philadelphia that killed eight people highlights the need for railroads to move faster to install a life-saving technology that the safety board first recommended decades ago.

Amtrak’s Northeast Regional Train No. 188 derailed on May 12, 2015 because it entered a curve at 106 miles per hour, more than twice the speed at which it should have been traveling. The safety board said it appears that the engineer operating the train, Brandon Bostian, did not realize the train was approaching that curve because he was distracted by radio transmissions about another train. More than 200 people were injured in the derailment.
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National Transportation Safety Board members clashed Tuesday over what caused last year’s fatal Amtrak derailment near Philadelphia, before the split body pinned blame on the speeding engineer.

The board voted, 3-1, in finding that Train 188 crashed because the operator failed to notice his speed had reached 106 mph, hitting a 50 mph curve just north of Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station.

Board vice chairwoman T. Bella Dinh-Zarr cast the dissenting vote after she had proposed shifting primary blame to the train’s lack of state-of-the-art GPS technology known as Positive Train Control (PTC).

“Positive train control would have provided this critical redundancy that would have prevented the accident,” Dinh-Zarr said.
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Japanese air bag manufacturer Takata Corp on Monday filed reports with U.S. auto safety regulators declaring nearly 14 million air bag inflators defective.

Earlier this month, Takata said it would expand recalls for defective air bag inflators by 35 million to 40 million in several tranches through 2019, adding to the 28.8 million recalled before May 4.
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Subaru ordered its dealers to stop selling two key models Thursday because of a defect that could result in the loss of steering.

The Japanese automaker says it is recalling 48,500 new and near new cars because drivers potentially could lose control if they have the defect. Of those, about 22,000 are in customer's hands, says spokesman Michael McHale

The National Institutes of Health is overhauling the leadership of its flagship hospital after an independent review concluded that patient safety had become “subservient to research demands” on the agency’s sprawling Bethesda campus.

The shake-up at the NIH Clinical Center, which was announced to staff Tuesday, represents the most significant restructuring at the nation’s premier biomedical research institution in more than half a century.

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Nearly half the patients treated in seven weeks with a suspect scope at University of Colorado Hospital developed the same dangerous infection, state health officials reported Tuesday.

Three of those patients later died.

The one-page Colorado Department of Health and Environment report shows the department learned of the problem on Feb. 1, when UCH notified it of infections following "procedures at the hospital involving a particular duodenoscope."

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Nine University of Colorado Hospital patients developed infections and three of them later died after undergoing surgeries with a medical device suspected of causing fatal infections nationally.

The instrument, an Olympus Medical System Corp. duodenoscope, is inserted down the throats of patients to perform difficult and sometimes life-saving surgeries. But it has proved difficult to clean and has become associated with sometimes-fatal infections.

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Takata Corp.’s air bag recalls may increase to 118.5 million worldwide after last week’s order by U.S. regulators compounded the biggest safety crisis in the history of the auto industry, according to estimates by Jefferies Group LLC.
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