Current Events

E-cigarettes may not be as harmless as many people think. A new study suggests they significantly increase the risk for heart attack.

Combined data from two national surveys of more than 69,000 people 18 and older carried out in 2014 and 2016 showed that compared with people who never used e-cigarettes, daily users almost doubled their risk for heart attack.

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A toxin inadvertently produced in the manufacture of a widely prescribed medicine but not spotted for years raises questions about regulators’ ability to detect risks in a sprawling global drug supply chain increasingly reliant on factories in China.

China’s Zhejiang Huahai Pharmaceutical (600521.SS), which produces bulk ingredients for drugmakers, told its customers in late June it had found NDMA in its valsartan, an off-patent blood pressure drug originally developed by Novartis (NOVN.S).

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A Missouri appeals court has ordered a new trial in a lawsuit alleging defects in a pelvic mesh implant made by C.R. Bard, finding the judge who oversaw a previous trial that ended in a defense verdict wrongly excluded testimony about the company’s prior criminal convictions.

In a unanimous decision on Tuesday, a three-judge panel of the Missouri Court of Appeals in Kansas City said plaintiff Eve Sherrer should have been allowed to question Bard executive John Weiland about the company’s 1994 guilty plea to charges it withheld information from the U.S.
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Radiologists are involved in 15% of diagnosis-related medical malpractice claims, second only to those of general medicine health care providers, according to a new report.

The United States filed a civil complaint against Long Island City, NY-based Foo Yuan Food Products Company Inc., its owner and president Hsing Chang, and its secretary Susan Chang, to stop them from preparing and distributing adulterated seafood products in violation of federal law.

The Department of Justice filed the complaint at the request of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
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General Mills Inc has been hit with a proposed class action lawsuit claiming the company failed to warn consumers about traces of the weedkiller glyphosate in its Cheerios cereals.

A Florida woman in her Thursday lawsuit in Miami federal court said she never would have purchased the company’s Cheerios and Honey Nut Cheerios had she known they contained the chemical, which has been classified as a “probable human carcinogen” by the World Health Organization’s cancer unit.

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Childhood exposure to secondhand smoke is linked to lung disease decades later, according to a study published Thursday by the American Cancer Society.

For 22 years, researchers have been following more than 70,000 adults who have never smoked. At the beginning of the study, they were asked whether they lived in a household with a smoker while they were children. Those who did were 31 percent more likely to die of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). This is the first study to find a correlation between the two.
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SHANGHAI (Reuters) - A Chinese drug company produced nearly 500,000 substandard vaccines for babies, roughly double an earlier estimate by authorities investigating a safety scandal, state news agency Xinhua reported on Wednesday.

China’s drug regulator in July accused Changsheng Bio-technology Co Ltd of selling 252,600 doses of ineffective DPT vaccines to inoculate children against diphtheria, whooping cough and tetanus.

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(CNN)Certain batches of hypothyroid medications are being recalled by Westminster Pharmaceuticals after one of its Chinese suppliers failed a US Food and Drug Administration inspection.

The medication in question contains a combination of levothyroxine, called LT4, and liothyronine, called LT3. Both are synthetic thyroid hormones used when a person's thyroid gland is no longer functioning properly.

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The FDA has updated its list of blood pressure medications that are being recalled after traces of a cancer-causing ingredient were found in several batches.

The agency last month said it was recalling valsartan tablets made in China after tests showed some contained Nitrosodimethylamine, or NDMA,  a probable carcinogen.

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Monsanto Co. was socked with $289 million in damages in the first trial over claims that its Roundup weed killer causes cancer.

Lee Johnson, a former school groundskeeper whose doctors didn’t think he’d live long enough learn the verdict, prevailed Friday in San Francisco state court after jurors deliberated for three days. The trial was an important test of the evidence against Monsanto and will serve as a template for litigating thousands of other claims over the herbicide.

Johnson was seeking $412 million in damages.
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