Current Events

The US Food and Drug Administration has told manufacturers of prescription testosterone treatments for men that they need to add a warning on their drug label about an increased risk of blood clots in the veins.

Such clots can lead to complications such as deep vein thrombosis, which causes severe pain, or a life-threatening pulmonary embolism, which occurs when a clot breaks off and travels through the veins into the lungs.

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Mykia Jordan has no memory of the car accident that put her in a coma for three weeks, left a large scar across her jaw and caused the limp that forces her to walk with a cane at 23.

She only knows what the police and others told her — that in the middle of a Sunday afternoon, with her 3-month-old son strapped in a car seat, she lost control of her Chevrolet Cobalt on a freeway ramp in Detroit. It crashed into a cement barrier and overturned, crushing the roof around her. The air bags did not deploy.

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Government warnings a decade ago about the risks associated with children and adolescents taking antidepressants appear to have backfired, causing an increase in suicide attempts and discouraging many depressed young people from seeking treatment, according to a study published Wednesday in the academic journal BMJ.

Researchers said their findings underscore how even well-intentioned public health warnings can produce unintended conseque­n­c­­es, particularly when they involve widespread media attention and sensitive topics such as depression and suicide.

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Leann Darrow has been waiting on her General Motors dealership for more than a month to get the defective ignition switch on her 2005 Chevrolet Cobalt replaced. She has been nervous about driving the car, but as of last week, she was still waiting for an appointment to open.

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General Motors recalled some 3.16 million midsize and large car models in the USA on Monday for a defect similar to the deadly ignition switch flaw that led to a recall of 2.19 million Chevrolet Cobalts and other small cars in the USA this year.

This latest recall comes as CEO Mary Barra is to testify before a House subcommittee Wednesday about the initial switch defect.

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General Motors is recalling more than half a million Chevrolet Camaros because of the danger that a bump to the keys could suddenly turn off the ignition — a problem similar to the defect that led the automaker to recall millions of small cars this year.

G.M. said that a driver’s knee could jostle the key fob, causing the ignition to turn off and cutting the engine. The automaker said it was aware of three crashes and four injuries related to the defect, which is in about 510,000 Camaros worldwide from the 2010 to 2014 model years.

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DETROIT (AP) -- Lawyers for a Georgia family that is trying to reopen a wrongful death lawsuit against General Motors say the company is trying to move the case to federal court so it can use bankruptcy as a shield from the claim.
 
The lawyers, Lance Cooper and Jere Beasley, said Wednesday in a statement that GM's court filings run counter to a promise made by GM CEO Mary Barra to fairly compensate families of people killed or those injured in crashes caused by defective ignition switches.

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Washington— General Motors Co. is in compliance with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s request for documents in connection with the government’s investigation into the automaker’s recall of 2.6 million vehicles linked to 13 deaths and 54 crashes, and the automaker is no longer racking up $7,000 per day in fines.

GM will pay more than $420,000 in cumulative fines for not meeting NHTSA’s April 3 deadline to answer 107 detailed questions about its recall. That’s in addition to a $35 million fine that GM agreed to pay May 16 for delaying the defective ignition switch recall for a decade.

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Rosemarie Noto’s daughter suffered for 1 1/2 years because of a medical testing error that could have been prevented. A Johns Hopkins study found that her experience is not unusual; diagnostic errors such as these cause billions in malpractice claim payouts and pose a significant patient safety risk in the United States.

“This is more evidence that diagnostic errors could easily be the biggest patient safety and medical malpractice problem in the United States,” says Dr. David E. Newman-Toker, Ph.D., an associate professor of neurology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and leader of the study published online in BMJ Quality and Safety. “There’s a lot more harm associated with diagnostic errors than we imagined.”

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DETROIT — To the legal department at General Motors, secrecy ruled.

Employees were discouraged from taking notes in meetings. Workers’ emails were examined once a year for sensitive information that might be used against the company. G.M. lawyers even kept their knowledge of fatal accidents related to a defective ignition switch from their own boss, the company’s general counsel, Michael P. Millikin.

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A day after issuing a scathing report on safety shortcomings, General Motors announced four more recalls, three of them involving air bags that may not deploy in a crash.

With the latest four, GM has now had 34 recalls so far this year that have involved 13.9 million vehicles in the U.S. CEO Mary Barra is pressing the company to carefully sort through any lingering questions about safety in its vehicles, an outgrowth of the ignition switch recall in Chevrolet Cobalts and other compact cars that are being blamed for 13 deaths.

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