Current Events

The White House announced a plan Thursday to improve antibiotics as President Obama's chief science adviser called the problem of antibiotic resistance a potential threat to the nation and the world.

"The rise in antibiotic-resistant bacteria represents a serious domestic and international challenge to human and animal health, national security and the economy," John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said at a news conference.

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Years before GM cars with faulty ignition switches were linked to a series of fatal accidents, the nation's car safety watchdog had chance after chance to spot the defect and push General Motors to recall its deadly cars.

Instead, the watchdog wagged its tail and meekly rolled over — and not for the first time. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) — long ago a standard-setter for safety regulators — has repeatedly failed to spot defects, pursue investigations forcefully or use its powers to get defective cars off the road.

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Federal regulators are reversing course and will resume publicly releasing data on hospital mistakes, including when foreign objects are left in patients' bodies or people get the wrong blood type.

USA TODAY reported last month that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services quietly stopped publicly reporting a host of life-threatening mistakes, after denying in 2013 that it would do so.

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Hospitals continue to overuse antibiotics despite warnings that pervasive use can lead to drug resistance and cause billions of dollars in excess healthcare costs, according to a retrospective analysis of 505 hospital members of the Premier health alliance.

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Boston Scientific Corp. (BSX) was ordered to pay $73 million to a woman who said a defectively designed vaginal-mesh implant left her in constant pain, in the first award against the device maker over its incontinence slings.

Boston Scientific is liable for Martha Salazar’s injuries, which she blamed on the company’s Obtryx sling, jurors in Texas state court in Dallas said yesterday. They awarded her about $23 million in compensatory damages and $50 million in punitive damages, according to a court filing.

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Halliburton agreed Tuesday to pay $1.1 billion to settle claims from plaintiffs who contend they were economically harmed by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the 2010 disaster that has spawned a number of expensive and contentious lawsuits.

Halliburton has long insisted that the cement job it did to seal BP’s Macondo oil well was not to blame for the blowout and fire that sank the Deepwater Horizon rig and triggered the largest oil spill in U.S. history. Nonetheless, the company had set aside $1.3 billion for possible payments.

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Johnson & Johnson’s (JNJ) bid to convince doctors the metal-on-metal version of its Pinnacle hip implants were safe amounted to “marketing run amok,” a lawyer told jurors in the first case over the devices to go to trial.

J&J’s DePuy unit ignored signs the Pinnacle hips suffered from design flaws and assured doctors the metal devices worked “99.9 percent of the time,” Mark Lanier, a lawyer for a Montana woman who sued after complications forced her to have the device removed, told jurors today in Dallas federal court on the first day of trial of her lawsuit.

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A research team went over data stretching back to the mid-1970s in the wake of electronic cigarettes’ popularity. Health organizations have recently spoken out about the dangers of e-cigarettes, too.

Nicotine — whether it comes from a traditional or electronic cigarette — could be a gateway drug to marijuana and cocaine, according to a study in the New England Journal of Medicine.

"While e-cigarettes do eliminate some of the health effects associated with combustible tobacco, they are pure nicotine-delivery devices," said co-author Dr. Denise B. Kandel, a professor of sociomedical sciences at Columbia University Medical Center and a research scientist at the New York State Psychiatric Institute.

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Here’s a shocking statistic: Doctors screw up 15 percent of the time.

The consequences of this alarming level of bad decision-making, wrong diagnoses, and just plain incompetence are tragic. It’s one thing when a mechanic, lawyer, plumber, or teacher makes a mistake. When a healthcare provider gets it wrong, the results are often deadly.

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Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), which set aside $2.5 billion last year to resolve claims that 8,000 of its artificial hips were defective, faces a new round of lawsuits over another line of hip implants blamed for poisoning patients.

J&J’s DePuy unit is readying for the first trial of allegations that the metal-on-metal version of the Pinnacle hip was defectively designed and caused metal debris to leech into patients’ bloodstreams. The cobalt-and-chromium material caused an infection that forced Kathleen Herlihy-Paoli to have her artificial hips surgically removed, she said in court filings.

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Electronic cigarettes may not have the same harmful particles as traditional cigarettes do — but they might have worse ingredients.

Researchers from the University of Southern California found higher levels of harmful metals in secondhand smoke from e-cigarettes than traditional cigarettes, according to a report in the Journal of Environmental Science, Processes and Impact.

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