Johnson & Johnson has agreed to pay about $600,000 to resolve three cases in the first settlements of lawsuits related to the company’s all-metal hip implants, Bloomberg reports.
The report, which cites unnamed sources, says officials with Johnson & Johnson’s DePuy unit recently agreed to settle Nevada residents’ suits over the devices, which were recalled in 2010.
The hip implants in question ...
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According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, most products made today don’t contain asbestos, and the few modern-day products still containing asbestos that could be inhaled must be labeled as such.
That’s because studies of people who were exposed to asbestos in factories and shipyards indicate that breathing high levels of asbestos fibers can lead to an increased risk of:
According to a report by ProPublica, medical devices have no unique code that would allow the government to track problems.
Although many manufacturers imprint a serial number on their devices, there’s no standardized system that would enable the government to easily monitor them. And critics say this gap in FDA oversight has contributed to numerous high-profile cases of medical devices malfunctioning in recent years – injuring and even killing patients.
For example, ...
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An article in the New York Review of Books takes a look at three recent titles exploring a current American phenomenon that writer Marcia Angell terms a “rampaging epidemic of mental illness.”
The three titles are: The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth
by Irving Kirsch; Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America by Robert Whitaker; and Unhinged: The Trouble ...
The U.S. Food and Drug administration has ordered St. Jude Medical to do additional studies on patients implanted with medical device components that are blamed in as many as 20 deaths.
According to the New York Times, the FDA has also recommended that patients who received the Riata defibrillator lead — a wire that connects a defibrillator to a patient’s heart — get X-rays or other imaging to check for problems.
The ...
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According to a story on the NBC News Website, some patients who take antidepressants experience severe withdrawal symptoms when they try to go off the drugs – raising concerns that they’re essentially stuck taking them for the rest of their lives.
The report quotes a patient named Gina O’Brien as saying she feels that she’s now hooked on the drug and that its manufacturer controls her.
An inability to stop taking antidepressants ...
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