Current Events

SILVER SPRING, Md. — One pain patient lay on the floor. Another leaned against the wall, easing her back. A third paced to and fro.

At this week’s Food and Drug Administration hearing on chronic pain, accommodations were at the forefront.
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The passenger rail cars on an Amtrak train that derailed near Seattle last December, killing three people, were allowed by federal regulators to stay in service even though they didn’t meet current crash-protection standards, federal investigators said Tuesday.

The Talgo Inc. cars had to be specially modified to make them sturdier in a collision, but they still didn’t meet crash standards adopted in 1999 by the U.S. Federal Railroad Administration, according to newly released documents from the National Transportation Safety Board.
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ITHACA, N.Y. — Most nursing homes had fewer nurses and caretaking staff than they had reported to the government for years, according to new federal data, bolstering the long-held suspicions of many families that staffing levels were often inadequate.

The records for the first time reveal frequent and significant fluctuations in day-to-day staffing, with particularly large shortfalls on weekends. On the worst staffed days at an average facility, the new data show, on-duty personnel cared for nearly twice as many residents as they did when the staffing roster was fullest.
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CLEVELAND, Ohio - University Hospitals, in an answer to lawsuits, has denied liability for the loss of 4,000 eggs and embryos at its fertility center at the Ahuja Medical Center in Beachwood in March.

In documents filed in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court, hospital attorneys said families signed consent forms that detailed the risks involved with the frozen specimens.

"Plaintiffs were fully advised of the material risks, benefits and alternatives available for treatment, and thereafter voluntarily assumed and consented to those risks,'' the documents said.

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HOW FDA’S RECALL SYSTEM FAILS CONSUMERS: As the FDA prepares to update its food-recall system, your host spent the past several months speaking to the many victims who fell ill from E. coli after eating soy-nut butter.

The product — I.M. Healthy Original Creamy SoyNut Butter — was a favorite for people with food allergies and compromised immune systems.
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DETROIT (AP) — A nonprofit auto safety advocacy group is asking Ford to recall 1.35 million Explorer SUVs due to continued complaints of exhaust fumes in the passenger compartments.

The Center for Auto Safety says it found 44 complaints in a government database about fumes and potential carbon monoxide after owners had taken Explorers in for free repairs in a Ford customer service campaign that started last October.

The center made its request in a letter to Ford CEO Jim Hackett this week.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has been investigating the problem for two years in police and civilian Explorers from the 2011 through 2017 model years, but it has not reached a conclusion.
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President Donald Trump in May said that drugmakers would soon announce “massive” price cuts, and his administration rolled out a plan to bring down the cost of medicines. But the companies don’t appear to have gotten that message.

Bayer raised the price of two cancer drugs by hundreds of dollars in May and Novartis followed by boosting four pricey treatments in June. Pfizer, one of the largest U.S.
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After Amtrak Train 188 derailed in Philadelphia on May 12, 2015, national safety experts said the accident that killed eight and injured hundreds could have been prevented with a safety fix Congress had mandated in 2008: Positive Train Control.

Railroads were supposed to have the system, which automatically controls train speeds to prevent accidents, in place by the end of 2015. But almost none had acted quickly enough to meet that requirement, so Congress voted to give them more time.

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Lisa French underwent spinal-fusion surgery in 2014 after her doctor warned her that a fall or trip might leave her paralyzed due to lingering complications from a car wreck.

Her recovery was arduous, but French says she was secure in her belief that her health insurance would make sure she suffered no financial harm from her medical bills.

Then, almost three years later, French, who works a night job as a billing clerk at a trucking company, answered a knock on the door one Sunday morning. A process server handed her papers that showed that the nonprofit St. Anthony North Health Campus in Westminster, where she had her operation, had sued her for $229,112.
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THURSDAY, June 28, 2018 (HealthDay News) -- Nearly 80 percent of meat in U.S. supermarkets contains antibiotic-resistant bacteria, according to the Environmental Working Group, a non-profit environmental research organization.

The bacteria -- often called "superbugs" -- were resistant to at least one of 14 antibiotics tested for in 2015 by the National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System, a federal-public health partnership.

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria were found on 79 percent of ground turkey samples tested; 71 percent of pork chops; 62 percent of ground beef; and 36 percent of chicken breasts, wings and thighs, the findings showed.
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The largest outbreak of E. coli in more than a decade is over, federal authorities said Thursday, after five people died and more than 200 others were sickened in three dozen states.

Although investigators determined that the E. coli came from contaminated romaine lettuce grown in Arizona's Yuma region near the border with Southern California, the Food and Drug Administration has not been able to link the outbreak to one farm, processor or distributor. New evidence showed bacteria taken from several canal water samples in the Yuma growing region to be a genetic match to the strain of bacteria that caused the outbreak, according to a statement from FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb on Thursday.
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