Legal Issues

FDA warns of children sickened from eyedrops, nasal sprays

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a warning that the potentially dangerous eye drops and decongestants – including a wide range of brand-name and generic varieties – don’t come in child-resistant packages, and can sicken children.

The medicines in both types of product cause blood vessels to constrict. While harmless when used as directed, less than a fifth of a teaspoon can send children to the hospital, or even put them in a coma.

And according to a U.S. Consumer Product Safety ...

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Case of brain-damaged girl spotlights difficult issues

An article in the New York Times tells the story of a brain-damaged, two-year-old girl whom doctors describe as “neurologically devastated,” and used her story as an example of the difficult issues surrounding the expensive care of patients who will never recover.

The girl, Portia Davis, has virtually no brain, the story says.

Portia’s mother, Venita Davis, was 27 weeks pregnant and had started having labor pains when her doctor gave her a drug to stop uterine contractions and ordered a sonogram, ...

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Reports of deaths revive energy drinks controversy

A wrongful death lawsuit against Monster Beverage Corp., and a recently released report indicating that the drink may have been responsible for five deaths, have reignited safety concerns about highly caffeinated “energy drinks,” ABC News reports.

The lawsuit was filed by the parents of Anais Fournier, a 14-year-old Maryland girl who drank two 24-ounce cans of Monster Energy on two consecutive days last December before going into cardiac arrest. Medical examiners determined that the caffeine caused her irregular heartbeat, although she ...

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J&J bought troubled Norian XR manufacturer to help own reputation

The Pennsylvania-based company Synthes produced a bone cement called Norian XR, which has been linked to the deaths of five patients who received it for spine surgery. Four high-ranking Synthes executives ended up doing jail time for their role in illegally marketing Norian, despite allegedly being aware of the health risks it presented.

Ironically, pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson acquired Synthes specifically as a means of dealing with damage to J&J’s own reputation in the wake of what Fortune magazine describes ...

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Synthes accused of illegally testing Norian bone cement on people

Fortune magazine recently published an article called “Bad to the Bone: A Medical Horror Story.”

The story concerns a Pennsylvania-based company called Synthes, which developed and marketed a bone cement called Norian XR for the ostensible purpose of repairing spine injuries. Norian led to the deaths of at least five patients, and jail time for four high-ranking Synthes executives.

As Fortune describes it, Synthes illegally marketed Norian despite increasing evidence that it might be dangerous. In effect, the company created a situation ...

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Lawmakers already had concerns about energy drink

On Oct. 22, reports came out linking Monster Beverage Corp.’s energy drinks to five deaths.

But federal lawmakers had already been pressuring the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to consider limiting the amount of caffeine in energy drinks after emergency room visits involving such products jumped 10-fold from 2005 through 2009, Bloomberg reports.

And according to an article in Forbes, Senators Dick Durbin and Richard Blumenthal, Democrats of Illinois and Connecticut, also want to determine the consequences of combining caffeine and other ...

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