Current Events

A bipartisan group of state attorneys general announced on Thursday that they are jointly investigating the marketing and sales practices of drug companies that manufacture opioid painkillers at the center of a national addiction epidemic.

Attorneys general from states including Massachusetts, Texas, Illinois and Pennsylvania announced the investigation two weeks after Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine sued five drug manufacturers for misrepresenting the risks of opioids.

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Takata Corp, the Japanese company facing billions in liabilities stemming from its defective air bag inflators, is preparing to file for bankruptcy as early as next week as it works toward a deal for financial backing from U.S. auto parts maker Key Safety Systems Inc, sources said on Thursday.

Takata, one of the world's biggest automotive suppliers, has been working for months to complete a deal with Key Safety.

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The Fiat Chrysler Automobile company said on Thursday that it is recalling about 300,000 Dodge Grand Caravan minivans after eight people suffered injuries from their airbags going off for no apparent reason.

Faulty wiring in the airbags of the minivans from the 2011-2012 model year caused them to deploy unintentionally, injuring eight people, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said.

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Nassau County on Monday sued nearly two dozen pharmaceutical manufacturers, distributors and doctors to recoup taxpayer-funded costs of fighting the opioid epidemic.

In a complaint filed in State Supreme Court in Mineola, lawyers for the county argued that the defendants engaged in a “sophisticated and highly deceptive and unfair marketing campaign” that aimed to expand the use of highly addictive prescription painkillers from short-term, post-surgical cases to everyday treatments.

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Millions of pounds of food — packaged under major brands including Libby’s, Tyson and Chef Boyardee and ranging from canned spaghetti and meatballs to frozen, ready-to-eat chicken strips — are under recall in the U.S. and Canada because of a labeling error by an unidentified bread crumb supplier.

The recalls started Thursday with an 87-ton recall of frozen burgers, meatballs and other raw and ready-to-eat beef products by Maid-Rite Specialty Foods LLC. In the following two days, eight more companies recalled fresh and frozen foods for a total of more than 3 million pounds of food pulled from retailers, restaurants, institutional kitchens and consumers’ homes for the lack of the word “milk” on the label.
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THURSDAY, June 8, 2017 (HealthDay News) -- Women are routinely prescribed more opioid painkillers than they need after Cesarean sections, creating a high risk for misuse, a trio of new studies suggests.

C-sections are the most common inpatient surgery in the United States, with 1.3 million procedures performed a year, according to the researchers. But there is little data on how much medicine patients actually need to manage their pain. To that end, how many pills are prescribed varies from provider to provider, the researchers added.
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The FDA has requested that a major drugmaker pull one of its prescription painkillers because the agency is believes “the benefits of the drug may no longer outweigh its risks.”

The agency has asked Endo Pharmaceuticals to voluntarily stop selling the reformulated Opana ER, an extended-release painkiller that the FDA believes is being violently abused.

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A federal jury on Friday awarded $15 million to a 10-year-old boy whose mother blamed his birth defect on AbbVie Inc's (ABBV.N) bipolar disorder drug Depakote that she took while pregnant, in the latest trial among hundreds of lawsuits over the product.

Jurors in federal court in East St. Louis, Illinois, awarded the compensatory damages to Stevie Gonzalez, who was born with spina bifida. His mother, Christina Raquel, said she was not adequately warned about a risk of birth defects when she took Depakote while pregnant.
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Which cars carry the greatest risk of fatal accidents? If you said "smaller is more dangerous," you're on the right track.

In latest Insurance Institute for Highway Safety study of which car models sustain the highest rate of driver fatalities, the seven worst models were all what IIHS classifies as minicars or small cars. While this verifies the commonsense notion that such vehicles would fare worse in serious crashes, it also shows a surprisingly huge gap in fatalities between the smallest and largest cars on the road.

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In what is being seen as a victory for long-term care providers, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has abandoned its appeal of a court ruling blocking its prohibition of pre-dispute nursing home arbitration agreements and proposed removing the ban.

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In March 2013, lung cancer took the life of Lavern Wilkinson, a 41-year-old Brooklyn single mom and church librarian.

The Republican leader of the state Senate, John Flanagan, has been insulting Wilkinson’s memory ever since by refusing to let a bill known as Lavern’s Law come up for a vote, even though more than 60% of senators back it.

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