Current Events

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The FDA has taken an initial step toward regulating -- and possibly banning -- the use of menthol in cigarettes.

On Tuesday, the agency issued an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, which requests information from the public regarding the effects of menthol in cigarettes and possible regulatory options. The comment period will last for 60 days before the FDA makes a decision. If a rule is ultimately proposed, there will be another comment period.

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General Motors announced last week that it's voluntarily recalling almost 900 2014 Chevy and GMC half-ton pickup trucks to replace the passenger airbag that might not fully inflate during an accident.

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Toyota has spent well over $1 billion settling lawsuits involving unintended acceleration, but the world's largest automaker still faces hundreds of other cases awaiting trial.

First up is a suit filed by the heirs of Noriko Uno, a 66-year-old bookkeeper who was killed when her Toyota Camry unexpectedly sped to 100 mph on a city street in Upland in 2009.

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The NCAA likes to talk about culture.

In a news conference last July discussing the draconian penalties against Penn State in the Jerry Sandusky sexual abuse scandal, president Mark Emmert used the word eight times.

“Certainly, the lesson here is one of maintaining the appropriate balance of our values,” Emmert said. “Why do we play sports in the first place, and does that culture ever get to a point where it overwhelms the values of the academy, those things that we all hold dear?”

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While there are no regulations regarding how many operations an orthopedic surgeon can perform in a given day, multiple studies and articles show that a fatigued surgeon may put patients at risk.

One orthopedic surgeon is facing 261 medical malpractice lawsuits in state Supreme Court in Dutchess County. Plaintiffs’ attorneys have accused Dr. Spyros Panos of bouncing from operating room to operating room, and performing negligent or phantom procedures, resulting in harm to their clients.

Panos didn’t respond to Journal messages and has declined to comment previously. So has his law firm, Feldman, Kleidman & Coffey.

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Patient safety researchers at Johns Hopkins University estimate the occurrence of 80,000 'never events' between 1990 and 2010 in American hospitals.

Medical professionals universally agree that 'never events' should never happen during surgery.  These include leaving a foreign object inside a patient's body (estimated to happen 39 times a week nationwide), performing the wrong procedure (20 times a week), and operating on the wrong body part (20 times a week).  The researchers believe their estimates are actually low.  Foreign objects left in the body are discovered only when a patient experiences complications and doctors make an effort to find the cause; a number may go undetected.

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After raising questions last month about the deal, U.S. District Judge James Selna in Santa Ana, Calif., gave his final approval to a $1.6 billion settlement between Toyota Motor Corp. and consumers of its vehicles who alleged they suffered economic losses because of the sudden acceleration recalls.

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THURSDAY, July 18 (HealthDay News) -- Most malpractice claims against primary care doctors are the result of drug errors and missed diagnoses, particularly of cancer, heart attack and meningitis, a new review finds.

Researchers analyzed 34 studies published over the past two years, including 15 studies based in the United States.

In the United States, primary care doctors accounted for between 7.6 percent and 16 percent of all malpractice claims, according to the study published online July 18 in the journal BMJ Open. The number of claims brought against U.S. primary care doctors has remained fairly stable over the past two decades.

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THURSDAY, July 18 (HealthDay News) -- The children of women who take drugs to treat epilepsy during pregnancy may be at increased risk for physical and mental developmental delays early in life, a large, new study finds.

Epilepsy is fairly common among women of childbearing age, and the use of antiepileptic drugs by pregnant women ranges from 0.2 to 0.5 percent.

In this study, researchers recruited Norwegian mothers at 13 to 17 weeks of pregnancy. For more than 61,000 children, mothers provided details about motor development, language skills, social skills and autistic symptoms at age 18 months. At 36 months, mothers provided that information for more than 44,000 children.

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SAN FRANCISCO — A St. Louis-based drug maker will pay $3.5 million to settle allegations that it paid doctors to prescribe “outdated, third rate” antidepressants and sleep aids, the U.S. attorney’s office in San Francisco announced Thursday.

A former employee of Mallinckrodt LLC originally filed the lawsuit in 2008 under the federal False Claims Act. The employee alleged that between 2005 and 2010, the company paid doctors consulting and speaking fees and other inducements in exchange for prescribing drugs that otherwise would not have been prescribed.

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