Current Events

(Reuters) - Merck & Co Inc said on Monday that it was prepared to pay $27.7 million to settle lawsuits by hundreds of people who sued the company over allegations that its osteoporosis drug Fosamax caused bones in the jaw to deteriorate.

Lawyers for Merck and plaintiffs disclosed the proposed settlement at a court hearing in New York to resolve 1,140 lawsuits pending in federal and state courts. Any settlement would need to be approved by a judge.

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The U.S. Supreme Court left intact a $142 million award against Pfizer Inc. (PFE) and let two similar suits go forward with claims that the drugmaker defrauded insurers by illegally marketing its Neurontin epilepsy drug.

The justices without comment today rejected Pfizer’s appeal, letting stand three connected federal appeals court decisions. The cases are part of the fallout from a 2004 guilty plea by Pfizer’s Warner-Lambert unit to charges that it promoted Neurontin for unapproved “off-label’” uses.

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Chrysler is recalling 5,663 cars with all-wheel drive (or 4x4), an 8-speed transmission and a V-6 engine. Affected models are the Chrysler 300, Dodge Charger and Ram 1500 pickup.

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Support is growing for the federal government to stand firm on a 2015 deadline for new rail safety systems to be installed following a fatal commuter train derailment in New York City that experts say could have been prevented with the technology.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.), a primary sponsor of the mandate, urged colleagues Thursday not to relax the deadline by which commuter railroads and many freight railroads must deploy "positive train control," or PTC—networks of signals and onboard computers designed to slow or stop trains before accidents occur. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.) made a similar appeal after Sunday's crash.

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Johnson & Johnson officials destroyed or misplaced documents related to its vaginal-mesh implants and should be barred from relying on some defenses in planned trials over the devices, patients’ lawyers said.

Officials of J&J’s Ethicon unit, which made the company’s Gynecare Prolift implant, lost or disposed of potentially hundreds of thousands of documents over a decade even though they were ordered by executives to preserve them, attorneys for women who blame the devices for their injuries said in a court filing in West Virginia Dec. 2.

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When a Metro-North train jumped the tracks in the Bronx on Sunday morning, killing four people and injuring more than 70, it was going 82 miles per hour, on a 30 m.p.h. curve. Why it hit that horrific speed — whether because the engineer was sleeping, distracted or incapacitated, or because of some catastrophic mechanical failure — is a question for the National Transportation Safety Board, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs Metro-North, and criminal investigators and prosecutors.

The question for the rest of us is why that train — and thousands of other trains in commuter and freight railroads across the country — had no automated system to slow or stop it when it ran out of control.

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This is your heart on an energy drink, and it’s contracting significantly faster than it was before you opened that can full of liquid stimulant.

System enables new uses, but critics say this flexibility comes with risks.

The Mayo Clinic's Dr. Richard Marsh helps control brain seizures in epileptic patients with a fiber-optic laser first introduced to treat prostate tumors.

At the University of Minnesota, Dr. Ganesh Raveendran has figured out how to treat young stroke victims with a device designed for congenital heart defects.

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Patients injured by a flawed hip implant sold by Johnson & Johnson have directed their anger at myriad places over the years. The regulatory system that allowed the product’s sale. The company that repeatedly denied problems with the device. Even the doctors who implanted the hips.

Now, some patients have found a new target for their ire: the legal system and the lawyers they hired to sue Johnson & Johnson.

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Ten former N.H.L. players sued the league Monday for negligence and fraud, saying the sport’s officials should have done more to address head injuries but instead celebrated a culture of speed and violence.

The players, who were in the league in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, filed their suit in federal court in Washington. One of the lead lawyers is Mel Owens, a former N.F.L. player who has represented scores of other retired players in workers’ compensation cases.

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A patient with abdominal pain dies from a ruptured appendix after a doctor fails to do a complete physical exam. A biopsy comes back positive for prostate cancer, but no one follows up when the lab result gets misplaced. A child's fever and rash are diagnosed as a viral illness, but they turn out to be a much more serious case of bacterial meningitis.

Such devastating errors lead to permanent damage or death for as many as 160,000 patients each year, according to researchers at Johns Hopkins University. Not only are diagnostic problems more common than other medical mistakes—and more likely to harm patients—but they're also the leading cause of malpractice claims, accounting for 35% of nearly $39 billion in payouts in the U.S. from 1986 to 2010, measured in 2011 dollars, according to Johns Hopkins.

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