Current Events

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. nursing homes have been plagued with infection control deficiencies even before the coronavirus pandemic turned them into hotspots for COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the virus, a government report said on Wednesday.

Eighty-two percent of all nursing homes had an infection prevention and control deficiency cited in one or more years from 2013-2017, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

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(Reuters) - Johnson & Johnson on Tuesday announced it would stop selling its talc Baby Powder in the United States and Canada, saying demand had dropped in the wake of what it called “misinformation” about the product’s safety amid a barrage of legal challenges.

Immunity for corporations when they fail to take basic safety precautions against COVID-19 will cause more American workers and consumers to die and further hamper our economic recovery.

Blanket legal immunity will prolong the pandemic, with some businesses inevitably forgoing basic precautions. Workers and consumers will not return to offices, stores and restaurants if companies cannot be held accountable when they fail to prioritize health and safety. If no one is responsible, no one is safe. People will not go back to their normal routines if they don’t feel safe.

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Nursing homes operated by Life Care Centers of America, one of the largest chains in the industry, violated federal standards meant to stop the spread of infections and communicable diseases even after outbreaks and deaths from covid-19 began to sweep its facilities from the Pacific Northwest to New England, inspection reports show.

Over the past six weeks, as the nationwide death toll among the elderly soared, government inspectors discovered breakdowns in infection control and prevention at at least 10 Life Care nursing homes that underwent covid-19 inspections overseen by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. That does not include deficiencies found at the Life Care Center of Kirkland in Washington state, which suffered the country’s first reported outbreak of the novel coronavirus in February.

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There’s a tension at the heart of all of the plans to reopen the country in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic: The economy needs Americans to get back to work, but workplaces need employees and customers to feel that coming back won’t endanger their health or their lives.

Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, seems to be concerned primarily with the first half. The biggest obstacle, as he sees it, is not a deadly disease but rapacious trial lawyers, capitalizing on the virus to chase ambulances and bankrupt American businesses.

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LONG ISLAND, NY — Long Island hospitals were recently graded on their safety standards, according to new spring 2020 ratings released by the Leapfrog Group this week.

Safety grades are released by the nonprofit organization twice per year, in the spring and the fall. The ratings of more than 2,600 hospitals nationwide focus on accidents, injuries and infections, and help to assess how well a facility prevents medical errors and other harm to patients.

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(Reuters) - U.S. consumer advocates are urging Congress to resist growing demands by companies for protections from coronavirus-related lawsuits as states start to ease pandemic restrictions and businesses begin to reopen.

Led by Public Citizen and the Center for Justice and Democracy, the groups said in a letter sent on Wednesday to U.S. House and Senate leaders that “legal liability is one of the most powerful incentives we have to ensure that businesses operate safely.

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ALBANY – Every day, doctors, nurses and other health care professionals across New York risk potentially deadly exposure to COVID-19 as they work the front lines to treat coronavirus patients.

(Reuters) - The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said on Wednesday it was requesting makers of all versions of heartburn drug Zantac to remove the drugs from the market immediately due to the presence of a probable carcinogen.

French drugmaker Sanofi SA’s Zantac and some generic versions of the treatment, also known as ranitidine, have been recalled over the last year due to possible contamination with N-nitrosodimethylamine (NDMA).

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The large red-and-white bins at Walmart pharmacies across the country read, in bold all-caps type: “Approximately every 40 seconds an American will have a heart attack.”

Inside the 3-foot-tall cartons, adorned with the American Heart Association and Bayer logos, were dozens of boxes of low-dose Bayer aspirin.

The implication was that everyone could reduce their heart attack risk by taking a “baby aspirin.” But recent studies have found that’s not the case.

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Aspirin, the original wonder drug, has long been a go-to medicine for millions, a Jack-of-all trades remedy that is readily available and cheap. Championed for its ability to relieve pain, fever and inflammation, aspirin has been a staple in home medicine cabinets and first-aid kits for more than a century.

Yet in recent years its reputation has been sullied by recognition of potentially serious side effects, especially dangerous bleeding in the gastrointestinal tract or the brain. Given aspirin’s longevity and over-the-counter status, those risks are sometimes overlooked by consumers who take it with less care than is medically warranted.

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