Current Events

Earlier this year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a stunning statistic. Seventy-two thousand people, it estimates, died of drug overdoses in 2017. The huge increase in deaths is largely due to heroin and powerful synthetic opioids like fentanyl.

One of the tools being used to fight that wave of deaths is the drug naloxone. It's been called the Lazarus drug for its ability to revive people dying from overdoses. It can be injected or simply administered through a nasal spray. (The spray form of the drug is known by the brand name Narcan.)

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Wells Fargo & Co will not finish paying back the estimated 600,000 customers it wrongly charged for auto insurance until at least 2020, the bank said in a letter to U.S. lawmakers seen by Reuters.

U.S. regulators slapped Wells Fargo with a $1 billion penalty in April when it admitted to wrongly forcing drivers into auto insurance policies. That agreement envisioned the customer payouts would finish within months.

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The Food and Drug Administration is poised to approve a new form of a powerful opioid for use in hospitals and emergency rooms despite opposition from the head of the committee that reviewed the drug.

The FDA is scheduled to decide by Nov. 3 whether to allow a California company to produce a 30-microgram pill form of sufentanil, a potent painkiller commonly used after surgery.

Federal regulators are investigating Mercedes-Benz over whether it was too slow to mail out notices for a recall of 1.4 million cars in 2017.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration sent the German carmaker a 14-page letter asking it to explain why customers weren’t informed of the recall within the federally mandated time period.

The threat posed by the overuse of antibiotics is becoming increasingly worrying. Last week, a Public Health England report warned that antibiotic-resistant superbugs – resulting from prolific prescriptions – are now killing more than 2,500 Britons every year.

On August 29, 2018, Alcon announced an immediate, voluntary market withdrawal of the CyPass Micro-Stent from the global market. In addition, Alcon advised surgeons to immediately cease further implantation with the CyPass Micro-Stent and to return any unused devices to Alcon. This action was based on an analysis of five-year post-surgery data from the FDA-mandated post-approval safety study.

Ridgefield, Connecticut-based Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals Inc. was not upfront about the risks of its blood thinner, Pradaxa, a federal jury found Wednesday evening before returning a $1.25 million award for the family of an 84-year-old woman who died of severe bleeding.

The nine-person jury in the Southern District of West Virginia, Huntington Division, found for the family of Betty Knight on the count of fraud, awarding $50,000 in medical expenses and $200,000 in pain and suffering. It also awarded the family $1 million in punitive damages. But jurors found for the company, which is headquartered in Germany, on the first four counts regarding adequacy of warning labels and warrant claims.
Boehringer said in a statement that it would appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Virginia.c

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(Reuters) - A U.S. judge on Monday affirmed a verdict against Bayer AG unit Monsanto that found its glyphosate-based weed-killers responsible for a man’s terminal cancer, sending the German company’s shares down 8 percent.

In a ruling by San Francisco’s Superior Court of California, Judge Suzanne Bolanos said she would slash the punitive damages award to $39 million from $250 million if lawyers for school groundskeeper Dewayne Johnson agreed.

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(Reuters) - Wells Fargo & Co will pay $65 million to settle claims that it misled investors about its “cross-selling” business strategy, the New York Attorney General’s office said on Monday.

A push by Wells Fargo to get existing customers to buy more of the bank’s products, known as “cross-selling,” was at the center of a fake customer accounts scandal that has dogged the bank for two years.

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The man was 66 when he came to the hospital with a serious skin infection. He had a fever and low blood pressure, as well as a headache. His doctors gave him a brain scan just to be safe. They found a very small bulge in one of his cranial arteries, which probably had nothing to do with his headache or the infection. Nevertheless, doctors ordered an angiogram to get images of brain blood vessels. This test, in which doctors insert a plastic tube into a patient’s arteries and inject dye, found no evidence of any blood vessel problems. But the dye injection caused multiple strokes, leading to permanent issues with the man’s speech and memory.

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NEW YORK (Reuters) - Prices for two dosages of the blood pressure drug valsartan rose more than any other drug in the United States in September, following a recall of much of the drug’s supply.

Chinese pharmaceutical ingredient manufacturer Zhejiang Huahai Pharmaceuticals recalled valsartan from consumers in the United States in July after finding traces of a probable carcinogen.

According to the National Average Drug Acquisition Cost (NADAC) survey for last month, prices for 160 milligram and 80 milligram tablets of the drug more than doubled last month from August rates.

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