Current Events

The manufacturer of the medical scopes at the center of a deadly bacterial outbreak at UCLA Medical Center is under investigation by federal officials for possible violations of laws that ban improper payments to doctors and other customers.

Olympus Corp. of Americas, the U.S. subsidiary of the Japanese manufacturer, said earlier this month that the Justice Department had been investigating its medical business since November 2011.

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The FDA has issued a Class I recall on more than 12,000 General Electric MRI systems because of a potentially life-threatening, nonfunctioning part of the devices.

Class I is the FDA's most serious designation for recalls, indicating severe injury or death could occur as the result of issues with a product.

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Suffering. The very word made doctors uncomfortable. Medical journals avoided it, instructing authors to say that patients “ ‘have’ a disease or complications or side effects rather than ‘suffer’ or ‘suffer from’ them,” said Dr. Thomas H. Lee, the chief medical officer of Press Ganey, a company that surveys hospital patients.

But now, reducing patient suffering — the kind caused not by disease but by medical care itself — has become a medical goal. The effort is driven partly by competition and partly by a realization that suffering, whether from long waits, inadequate explanations or feeling lost in the shuffle, is a real and pressing issue. It is as important, says Dr. Kenneth Sands, the chief quality officer at Harvard’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, as injuries, like medication errors or falls, or infections acquired in a hospital.

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Patient advocates are opposing a money-saving item in Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo's proposed budget to eliminate a website that provides consumers with information on all licensed doctors in the state, including criminal convictions and malpractice awards.

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General Motors is recalling more than 81,000 cars because their power steering systems could suddenly fail, making the vehicles harder to turn. The action expands a recall from last March that covered 1.3 million vehicles in the United States.

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How safe is your car? According to an Arizona auto repair group, one in five cars nationwide has an unfixed recall.

Family-oriented vehicles are most at risk, with one in three minivans and one in five SUVs with unfixed recalls, according to a press release from the Neighborhood Auto Repair Professionals in Arizona.

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However bad you thought smoking was, it’s even worse.

A new study adds at least five diseases and 60,000 deaths a year to the toll taken by tobacco in the United States. Before the study, smoking was already blamed for nearly half a million deaths a year in this country from 21 diseases, including 12 types of cancer.

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TARRYTOWN, N.Y. — Two days after the deadliest train crash in the history of the Metro-North Railroad, investigators on Thursday sought to shed light on a central mystery of the crash: how a train-on-car crash spread its devastation to the interior of the train.

A federal safety official, asked at a briefing about the portion of the electrified third rail that tore through the front of the train, said the way Metro-North trains draw power from the third rail is different from other rail agencies.

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(Bloomberg) -- Patients with high blood pressure need extra treatment within about six weeks to prevent heart attacks, strokes and death, according to a study that provides some of the first tips on timing for doctors.

The risk increased for patients whose pressure rose above 150 and the longer doctors delayed adding additional treatment, according to Alexander Turchin, senior author of the study in the British Medical Journal. The risk also rose the longer doctors waited to reevaluate patients after the extra medication was added, he said.

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SAN FRANCISCO - As many as 80 million customers of the nation's second-largest health insurance company, Anthem Inc., have had their account information stolen, the company said in a statement.

"Anthem was the target of a very sophisticated external cyber attack," Anthem president and CEO Joseph Swedish said in a statement posted on a website the company created for information about the incident.

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When Tove Schuster raced to help a fellow nurse lift a patient at Crozer-Chester Medical Center near Philadelphia in March 2010, she didn't realize she was about to become a troubling statistic.

While working the overnight shift, she heard an all-too-common cry: "Please, I need help. My patient has fallen on the floor."

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