Current Events

British Petroleum and its former subsidiary Arco will pay $14 million to settle a lawsuit over allegations that they failed to properly inspect and maintain underground storage tanks at nearly 800 gas stations around the state, prosecutors said Thursday.

California Attorney General Kamala Harris and eight district attorneys around the state, including Alameda County’s Nancy O’Malley, said the oil companies have violated 71 different state regulations for dealing with hazardous materials going back to 2006.

The violations included tampering with leak detection devices and alarms, failing to tell local officials about releases from the tanks, having no evacuation plans at gas stations and dumping hazardous waste into trash containers, according to the lawsuit, filed in 2013 in Alameda County.

Harris and local prosecutors filed a similar suit around the same time against ConocoPhillips and its affiliate, Phillips 66. The company settled in 2015 for $11.
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Even as generic drugmaker Mylan is dealing with a host of other issues, it is recalling more than 100,000 packages of clonazepam, its generic of Klonopin, a drug that is used to treat seizures and panic disorder.

According to the most recent FDA Enforcement reports, Mylan actually began the voluntary U.S. recall of clonazepam in September after discovering the product was out of spec for a known impurity at the 15 and 16 month testing periods. The report indicated they were manufactured at Mylan’s Morgantown, West Virginia, plant.
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Mazda Motor Corp. will recall about 70,000 RX-8 sports cars from the 2004-08 model years in the United States because of an issue with fuel pump sealing rings that may leak and catch fire, U.S. safety regulators said on Tuesday.

Contaminated syringes may have caused more than 150 bloodstream infections across several states, with long-term care residents being disproportionately hit, the Centers for Disease Control said last week.

The parents of 17-year-old Huma Hanif, who filed a lawsuit in April after their daughter's death from a malfunctioning airbag subject to a historic recall, have settled with all parties.

The Fort Bend County teen was the second person in the Houston area and the 10th nationwide to be killed by an airbag in a car crash. The family's product liability case filed in Harris County focused on the use of the explosive, ammonium nitrate, which is used in the airbag inflators. Defendants in the lawsuit included Japanese airbag maker Takata Corp., American Honda Motor Co.
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Medtronic faces a federal false claims and misbranding lawsuit that accuses the company of designing products for one purpose but tricking the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) into approving them for another to avoid expensive and time-consuming safety testing.

The suit, by a former Medtronic sales representative, alleges that the company designed a family of spinal devices for the neck but told the FDA they were to be used only in the chest and lower spine, where they were almost always too small to work.

In court documents, Medtronic denied the allegations, saying it developed the product in different sizes to accommodate patients’ anatomical differences.
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There are still about 70 million cars in the United States equipped with Takata airbags that could prove fatal in even a minor accident, like the one that killed Huma Hanif, 17, fatally injured by shrapnel from the airbag when her Honda Civic rear-ended another car at low speed in Houston.

Airbags in older cars like Hanif's, about 300,000 of them, are the biggest problem -- they have a 50 percent chance of exploding, safety officials say.

Takata itself is not in very good shape either. It is teetering on bankruptcy and seeking a buyer. This raises the question of who takes responsibility for the airbags if Takata goes away.
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Ads for baby and toddler foods often go against the nutritional advice of health experts, a new study shows.

Researchers found that in 2015 companies spent $77 million in the United States on marketing infant formula, baby food, and food and beverages for toddlers.

The good news, the researchers said, is that the majority of those products were nutritious choices, such as pureed fruits and vegetables, whole grains and dairy products.

The bad news, they added, is that a large share of companies' marketing dollars -- almost 60 percent -- went toward products that are not recommended for most young children.

That included sugar-sweetened "toddler milk," snack foods low in nutrients, and high-calorie liquid supplements like PediaSure.
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  Pounding too many energy drinks could wreck your liver — just as much as too many beers.

A 50-year-old construction worker developed acute hepatitis, likely from gulping up to five energy drinks a day for three weeks, according to a BMJ Case Report released Tuesday.

Although the man had chronic hepatitis C, his doctors blamed the beverage boosters for his liver failure.

 Even with repeated cleanings, it's virtually impossible to remove all contamination from robotic surgical instruments, a new study suggests.

"One of the top priorities for hospitals is to treat patients safely and with minimal risk of infection," said study author Yuhei Saito, an assistant professor at the University of Tokyo Hospital in Japan.

"Our results show that surgical instruments could be placing patients at risk due to current cleaning procedures. One way to address this issue is to establish new standards for cleaning surgical instruments, including multi-part robotic tools," Saito said in a news release from the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America.

Over the course of 21 months, the researchers assessed protein residue on 132 robotic and standard surgical instruments that were cleaned according to manufacturers' instructions.
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Medical device maker Medtronic PLC said two people have died following dosing errors with its problem-plagued SynchroMed II infusion pump, an implanted device made in Minnesota that slowly injects pain medications into a patient's spinal canal.

More than 238,000 of the devices have been implanted in patients with advanced metastatic cancer, chronic pain and severe spasticity. Various problems with the device have been linked to more than a dozen deaths in recent years. The Food and Drug Administration filed a consent decree against Medtronic in 2015 for repeated failures to correct manufacturing problems.

On Tuesday, regulators in the United Kingdom published an update from Medtronic on the specific problem of "overinfusion," which happens when the programmable SynchroMed II puts out more pain medication than intended.