Current Events

(Reuters) - Boehringer Ingelheim will pay $13.5 million to resolve claims by state attorneys general that the pharmaceutical company used deceptive and misleading marketing to promote the use of four of its drugs for unapproved purposes.

The settlement was announced on Wednesday by attorneys general in 50 states to resolve allegations centered on how the drugmaker marketed its prescription drugs Aggrenox, Micardis, Atrovent and Combivent.

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AKRON, Ohio — Citing a spike in overdose deaths, growing demands for drug treatment and a strained budget, officials here in Summit County filed a lawsuit late Wednesday against companies that make or distribute prescription opioids. On Monday, Smith County in Tennessee did the same. And on Tuesday, nine cities and counties in Michigan announced similar suits.

Cities, counties and states across the country are turning to the courts in the spiraling opioid crisis. What began a few years ago with a handful of lawsuits has grown into a flood of claims that drug companies improperly marketed opioids or failed to report suspiciously large orders.
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TUESDAY, Dec. 19, 2017 (HealthDay News) -- The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday called for tougher warnings and "additional research" into a dye commonly used with standard MRIs.

The dye -- a "contrast agent" -- contains a metal called gadolinium.
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(Reuters) - Lawyers for General Motors (GM.N) on Monday urged a federal bankruptcy judge in Manhattan to throw out a settlement that would require the company to pay $1 billion to car owners suing over faulty ignition switches.

The carmaker made its argument on the first day of a scheduled three-day bench trial before Judge Martin Glenn of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New York.
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It was just a few minutes after 2 a.m. when Dennis Fegan awoke with a start. He got up from his bed and went to the laundry room, where he kept a calendar to record his seizures, and made a vertical mark on July 2, 2006. By late morning, when his parents found him and frantically called an ambulance, there were a dozen vertical marks on the date.
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A Bergen County jury returned a $15 million verdict Thursday against Johnson & Johnson subsidiary Ethicon in a suit over alleged defects in its Prolift pelvic repair product.

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A group of Democratic state attorneys general told President Donald Trump they’re prepared to take matters into their own hands if the administration fails to enforce consumer-protection laws.

Trump’s choice of budget director Mick Mulvaney as acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which Mulvaney has mocked, suggests the consumer watchdog may be less-than-zealous under his watch, 17 attorneys general wrote Tuesday in a letter to the president. The group, led by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and his California counterpart, Xavier Becerra, said they’ll pick up wherever Mulvaney leaves off.

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More than 200 people became sick and five were hospitalized in Australia after an outbreak of gastrointestinal illness aboard a cruise ship earlier this month.

Symptoms were reported by 209 guests among the 5,796 people aboard Ovation of the Seas ship, according to Royal Caribbean International cruise line spokeswoman Cynthia Martinez. The ship returned to Sydney on Dec. 7 at the end of a 14-night cruise that departed Singapore on Nov. 23.
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Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. is among the deadliest manufacturers in the nation for workers - resulting in deaths of five workers since 2015 - and the company’s safety lapses have also contributed to deaths of motorists on the road, a six-month investigation by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting has found.

Tires involved in three fatal accidents were manufactured in Goodyear plants in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and Danville, Virginia, where intense production demands and leaks in the roof during storms have endangered both workers and consumers, Reveal’s investigation found.

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After doing nearly 28 years for a crime he didn't commit, Bernard Young says he's not angry or bitter - though he's still got a score to settle with the City of Detroit and the police officer he claims wronged him.

On Wednesday,  the 59-year-old man whose hair turned gray in the prison system sued the City of Detroit and Sgt. Shelley Foy, claiming they are both responsible for letting him serve 27 years and 179 days in prison for molestation when they knew another man had committed the crime.

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Living within half a mile of a hydraulic fracturing site carries a serious risk for pregnant women, a new study has found. The drilling technique, also known as fracking, injects high-pressure water laced with chemicals into underground rock to release natural gas.

Women who lived within that distance to fracking operations in Pennsylvania were 25 percent more likely to give birth to low-weight infants than were mothers who lived more than two miles beyond the sites.

The five-year study of more than 1.1 million births in the state between 2004 and 2013, published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, also found lower birth weights, although not as low, in infants whose mothers lived between half a mile and two miles from a fracking site.
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