Current Events

The source of romaine lettuce E. coli bacteria that sickened 210 people in 36 states, including 11 in New York, has been detected in canal waters in the Yuma, Arizona, growing region, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced.

The CDC said this week that the agency and the U.
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is telling people not to eat Kellogg's Honey Smacks cereal, which has been linked to an outbreak of salmonella infections now numbering at least 100 people in 33 states.

"Do not eat this cereal," the agency declared on Twitter.

An updated advisory from the CDC recommends that consumers throw away the sweetened, puffed wheat cereal "regardless of package size or best-by date." It's still not clear how the contamination might have occurred.

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McDonald's has stopped selling salads at some 3,000 locations across the country amid a multi-state parasite outbreak that has sickened dozens of customers.

Officials with the fast-food restaurant chain said in a statement Friday that the salads have been removed from “impacted restaurants,” mainly in the Midwest, “out of an abundance of caution” until it can find a new supplier. The announcement comes after public health authorities in Illinois and Iowa warned that a number of recent cyclospora infections in those states appear to be linked to the salads.

“McDonald's is committed to the highest standards of food safety and quality control,” McDonald's said in the statement, adding that it is cooperating with public health officials investigating the outbreak.

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The size of the award sends a message that should be heard by the whole drug and medical device industry: Stop placing profits over safety. Or, as the women’s lawyer, Mark Lanier, put it in his closing remarks, “You don’t jack with people’s lives like this.”

Johnson & Johnson and its peers were once lauded as a collective of hero-innovators and credited with bringing an avalanche of lifesaving, world-changing technology from lab bench to patient bedside. Today they are more readily associated with rampant price gouging, the worst drug overdose epidemic in modern history and a steady beat of cases similar to the talc-cancer one, in which profitable products caused real harm.

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A salmonella outbreak linked to a popular Kellogg's cereal has infected 100 people, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Thursday.

The agency is urging consumers to avoid Honey Smacks, a sugary puffed wheat cereal which has been the subject of a recall by the company since mid-June. At least 30 of the 100 have been hospitalized, while no deaths have been reported, the CDC said.

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Johnson & Johnson was ordered Thursday to pay $4.69 billion to 22 women and their families who had claimed that asbestos in the company’s talcum powder products caused them to develop ovarian cancer.

A jury in a Missouri circuit court awarded $4.14 billion in punitive damages and $550 million in compensatory damages to the women, who had accused the company of failing to warn them about cancer risks associated with its baby and body powders.

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Hundreds of thousands of implantable heart defibrillators made by Minnesota’s St. Jude Medical are getting cybersecurity software updates, while older versions of the devices may have their wireless communication systems disabled because they can’t accept the update.

A series of 11 recent recall notices said that roughly 740,000 implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICDs) and cardiac resychronization therapy defibrillators (CRT-Ds) made by St. Jude Medical are eligible to receive new firmware that provides “an additional layer of protection against unauthorized device access.”

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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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