Current Events

A little-noticed ruling by three federal judges may have tipped the scales in favor of the tobacco industry’s bid to put decades of smoker lawsuits behind it.

The appeals court panel in Atlanta said individual smokers, already blocked from suing as a group, must each prove the cigarettes they used were defective, rather than relying on an earlier jury’s findings. That decision adds time, expense and uncertainty to their cases.

Read more.

You might say Jacob Epstein, a lean, healthy, 88-year-old Floridian, died in early May from a broken arm. Following surgery to reset the bone, he was given an antibiotic to prevent postoperative infection, a common hospital practice.

His daughter, Beth Fidanza, recalled that within a week her father developed diarrhea caused by a particularly nasty intestinal bacterium called Clostridium difficile, or C. diff. Another antibiotic seemed to eradicate the disease, but a month later the gut infection recurred. Mr. Epstein was given another antibiotic, but within days developed a fatal combination of kidney failure, dangerously low blood pressure and gastrointestinal bleeding.

Read more.

State and federal health officials privately urged the Food and Drug Administration nearly six years ago to alert hospitals about contamination risks from specialized medical scopes that have been tied to a recent series of deadly superbug outbreaks.

The 2009 appeal came after duodenoscopes were linked to drug-resistant infections in dozens of Florida hospital patients, including 15 who died. In emails and a phone briefing, epidemiologists at the Florida Department of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned that the infections occurred because hospitals were having trouble cleaning the scopes properly, records obtained by USA TODAY show.

Read more.

House Democrats want to boost funding for an automated train control system that could have prevented the deadly Amtrak derailment in Philadelphia last week. Policymakers are offering a motion to authorize $750 million for the program as part of a surface transportation bill being voted on Tuesday, the Hill reported.

“Americans deserve better infrastructure that puts safety first,” Drew Hammill, a spokesman for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said in a statement.

Read more.

A conductor critically injured in last week's deadly train derailment in Philadelphia has sued Amtrak, accusing the publicly funded passenger rail company of negligence, his lawyer said on Tuesday, adding to a string of lawsuits since the crash.

Emilio Fonseca, 33, was taking a restroom break in the first car during his work shift when the passenger train went off the rails, attorney Bruce Nagel told a news conference, saying the train suddenly surged forward and then crashed.

Read more.

For more than a decade, the Japanese company Takata, one of the largest suppliers of airbags, denied that its products were defective even as motorists were killed by exploding airbags and automakers around the world recalled millions of cars equipped with its products.

Read more.

More than a year before a medical scope infected patients with a superbug at UCLA and Cedars-Sinai medical centers, a similar outbreak in the Netherlands prompted Dutch regulators to ask the manufacturer to prove the device was safe.

Olympus Corp. failed to demonstrate a safe cleaning procedure, according to a new report. As a result, the Dutch hospital that suffered the outbreak, which sickened 22 patients, abandoned the scope for another model without the troublesome design.

Read more.

Ford is recalling about 12,300 2015 F-150 pickups in North America to check for a problem that could affect steering.

The issue is with the upper I-shaft that might have been riveted improperly, potentially causing it to separate, which could make it hard to steer and increase the risk of a crash.

Read more.

The consequences of General Motors’ long-delayed recall of defective small cars hit a grim milestone on Monday, when the company’s compensation fund said it had approved the 100th death claim tied to faulty ignition switches.

The toll far exceeds the 13 victims that G.M. had said last year were the only known fatalities linked to ignitions that could suddenly cut off engine power and disable airbags.

Read more.

Medical errors that can be traced to the automation of the U.S. health care system are increasingly an issue in medical malpractice lawsuits.

Some of the doctors, attorneys and health IT experts involved in the litigation fear that safety and data integrity problems could undercut the benefits of electronic health records unless HHS and Congress address them aggressively.

Read More.

Auto safety regulators are investigating a recall last year of some 895,000 Jeep and Dodge S.U.V.s with sun visors that can short-circuit and ignite after some of them apparently caught fire even after being repaired.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said it had received eight reports of fires in vehicles whose electrical wiring had been repaired in a recall started by Fiat Chrysler in July, according to a statement on its website announcing a “recall query.” There were no reports of injuries.

Read More.