According to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 85 percent of all strokes are “ischemic.” That means the blood flow to the brain is blocked – either by blood clots, or by fatty deposits in blood vessel linings called plaque.
Risk factors for stroke include high blood pressure, diabetes, long periods of physical inactivity and a family history of stroke. Use of birth control pills can increase the ...
continue reading...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 ...
continue reading...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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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has released a list of customers of a pharmacy linked with a deadly meningitis outbreak.
According to a story on Patch.com, the list does not include the specific products that the customers received from the New England Compounding Center in Framingham, Mass. The meningitis outbreak is linked to a batch of injectable steroid medication commonly used to treat steroids, which was ...
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Investment Website Seeking Alpha says that healthcare products giant Johnson & Johnson is poised to announce its third-quarter earnings report. The company is hoping to break a streak of revenue declines over the last two quarters, as well as net income declines over the past four quarters.
The report says Wall Street has a mixed view on the advisability of investing in the company. Goldman Sachs, for example, recently downgraded the ...
continue reading...The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has issued a warning about children five years of age and younger swallowing over-the-counter eyedrops and nasal decongestants.
The warnings encompass a wide range of brand and generic names, according to the Los Angeles Times. Most of them currently don’t come in child-resistant packaging. But the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission recently proposed requiring child-resistant packaging on all such products.
According to the FDA warning, there have been 96 cases of serious illness resulting from children ...
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