Current Events

When the 2002 Honda Civic crashed into the back of another car in a Houston suburb, authorities said the impact was moderate, and that everyone should have "been able to walk away," according to a sheriff's deputy. Instead, the Honda's 17-year-old driver bled to death.

The young woman likely would have survived, it turned out, had a defective airbag been replaced, something Honda claims it attempted to do, sending out six recall notices since the service action was first announced in 2011.

The incident, the latest of 11 deaths linked to defective Takata airbags, was by no means a rare incident. Safety experts say there have been a growing of crashes, injuries and fatalities in recent years involving vehicles with potentially life-threatening defects that haven't been fixed, despite ongoing recalls.
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Tesla Motors Inc. is recalling 2,700 Model X sport utility vehicles, the first such action for the SUV, to repair the third-row seats after strength tests done by the automaker found a potential problem.

“Recently, during an internal seat strength test that was conducted prior to the start of Model X deliveries in Europe, the recliner in a third row Model X seat unexpectedly slipped,” Tesla said Monday in an e-mail to affected customers, all of whom are in the U.S. “Until the recall is performed, you may make full use of your Model X, although we ask that you temporarily not have anyone sit in the third row seats while the car is in use.

The U.S. is in the midst of an opioid crisis. Deaths from prescription painkiller overdoses have quadrupled since 1999. To combat the epidemic, 49 states

Four days after a pair of Amtrak maintenance workers were killed when a train slammed into their backhoe, federal regulators have ordered the passenger rail line to conduct a thorough safety review of work-crew rules and regulations.

The mandate issued by the Federal Railroad Administration on Thursday is the strongest indication to date that investigators think that the two men would not have died in the wreck just south of Philadelphia if federal regulations had been observed.

In addition to reviewing safety rules with workers and their supervisors, the FRA also ordered Amtrak to focus on the effectiveness of communication between work crews and the dispatchers who control train movement.

G.M., the nation’s largest automaker, had already won two so-called bellwether trials being conducted to resolve a variety of legal claims tied to its recall two years ago of vehicles equipped with faulty ignitions.

The settlement of the latest case was unexpected, and an indication that G.
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Thomas Maino knew he was going to die. Suffering from serious ailments, the 93-year-old veteran had rejected invasive treatments and asked only that he be made comfortable after he was admitted to a Syracuse nursing home in November 2008.

But on a snowy Saturday morning the following January, his moans could be heard down the hallway.

Over the next eight hours, coworkers reported to the nurse in charge of Maino’s unit that he needed pain medication. That nurse, Maura Quinn, gave him only Tylenol and never alerted the doctor.
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Pfizer's Consumer Healthcare is pulling tens of thousands of bottles of one of its adult Robitussin products in the U.S. due to a labeling issue. It comes just weeks after a different kind of manufacturing snafu led to the recall of its children's Advil products in Canada.

According to the most recent FDA Enforcement Report, Pfizer ($PFE) is voluntarily recalling 63,636 bottles of Adult Robitussin PEAK COLD Cough & Chest Congestion DM Liquid in 8-oz.
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Hospitals' use of digital medication orders have dramatically reduced the number of dangerous drug errors, but their computer systems still fail to flag 13% of potentially fatal mistakes, a report released Thursday shows.

Medication errors are by far the most common mistakes made in hospitals — and hospital errors are the third leading cause of death in the United States. Digital drug ordering is part of so-called "computerized physician order entry," or CPOE, which was designed to address the problem.

"These findings show the transition from pen and paper to electronic ordering and prescribing is making patients safer — with the systems flagging nearly 9 in 10 possible errors,"   said Andrew Gettinger, a physician and chief safety officer in the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT in an email. "But the report also serves as an important reminder to clinicians and the health IT community broadly that there is more work to do when it comes to our top priority: the health and safety of our patients.
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A 10th person has died in a crash in the U.S. involving a ruptured Takata Corp. air-bag inflator, according to the U.S.
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Diabetes drugs containing either of two key compounds can cause heart failure in certain patients, federal drug regulators said Tuesday as they announced new warnings to be added to the labels of nearly a half dozen commonly prescribed medications. Read more