Personal Injury & Wrongful Death

Yesterday, the National Transportation Safety Board, NTSB, requested that the Federal Aviation Administration increase inspections of certain Pratt & Whitney engines on dozens of passenger jets to detect possible flaws linked to the most catastrophic type of failure. The NTSB asked that the FAA require that PW2037 engines undergo recurring inspections for the time being once they reach a certain point in their operation.

The request affects more than 700 engines on some 300 Boeing Co 757 aircraft worldwide, including at least several dozen operated by U.S. airlines. These include Delta Air Lines Inc, United Airlines, a unit of UAL Corp, Northwest Airlines Co, and American Airlines, a unit of AMR Corp.

The NTSB action was prompted by a failure of an engine in a Delta flight during takeoff on August 6 in Las Vegas. The takeoff was aborted safely and there was no fire or injuries among the 166 passengers and crew.

A new federal report found that nine of every 10 nursing homes were cited for violating federal health and safety standards last year. For-profit homes were more likely to have problems than other types of nursing homes, according to the report. Problems included infected bedsores, medication mix-ups and poor nutrition. About one-fifth of the complaints verified by federal and state authorities involved the abuse or neglect of patients.
Elderly people are entitled to basic safety, respect and dignity. If you or someone you love is a victim of elder abuse or nursing home abuse, you have the right to hold the abuser responsible in court. Finch McCranie, LLP has represented injured Georgians in elder abuse lawsuits and other personal injury suits since 1965. With our firm on the case, you can rest assured that you’ll get the extensive experience and personalized attention you deserve. For a free consultation, call our Atlanta office today at 404 658-9070.

Digoxin was developed by the company Actavis Totowa to treat arrhythmias (abnormal heat rhythm) and allegedly to prevent heart failure. In April of this year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a recall of this drug. As it turned out, the use of this product leads to a dangerous side effect known as digitalis toxicity, a process that occurs when digitalis is not excreted normally through urine and the body is overexposed to the drug. This process may be fatal to the victim, which is why this drug was recalled from the market.

We had previously written a blog about Byetta developed by Eli Lilly and Company and Amylin Pharmaceuticals, Inc. This drug is used in the treatment of Type 2 diabetes, however, reports of patients developing pancreatitis, a potentially deadly side effect, occurred late in the 2007 period and have been increasing since that time. Indeed, in the fall of this year, a lawsuit was filed in California by a plaintiff who had been hospitalized for pancreatitis.

It seem as though there are new drugs coming to market almost everyday. Television ads about drugs are omnipresent. These two drugs, two among hundreds of other drug products, help to demonstrate the dangers associated with drugs that are not carefully screened by a manufacturer before being placed into the marketplace. Consumers now, more than ever, must be made aware of the dangers associated with drug treatment. The American public clearly is using more and more drug treatment. For this reason alone, it is increasingly imperative that manufacturers provide adequate warnings to patients and their physicians of dangers known to be associated with these products. Side effects can be deadly when powerful medications are involved and the public has a right to know of these dangers.

New federal regulations that restrict Medicare payments to hospitals for the extra care required to treat patients harmed by certain preventable infections and medical errors went into effect on Wednesday, October 1.

The rules adopted by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) aims to provide hospitals with a financial incentive to improve patient care.

Under the new regulations, CMS will withhold payments to hospitals for care needed after patients suffer from certain preventable errors or omissions in care. These include hospital acquired urinary tract infections; certain bloodstream infections and select surgical site infections – specifically from coronary artery bypass graft (CABG), certain weight loss surgery (laparoscopic gastric restrictive surgery and gastroeneterostomoy), and orthopedic procedures (spine, neck, shoulder, elbow); serious bed sores; objects left in patients’ bodies following surgery; blood incompatibility; air embolism; deep vein thrombosis/pulmonary embolism (formation/movement of a blood clot) following total knee and hip replacement; falls and trauma (such as burns and electric shock); and extreme blood sugar derangement.

Motorcycle injuries and deaths continue to rise as more people utilize motorcycles and scooters for daily transportation. The Washington Post reports that in an eight-hour span over the Labor Day weekend motorcycle accidents in the metropolitan District of Columbia area left four people dead. One top transportation official calls the rise in motorcycle crashes “our nation’s greatest traffic highway safety challenge.”

While only 2 percent of all vehicles on the nation’s roads last year were motorcycles, they were involved in 11 percent of all traffic accidents. More than 5,100 riders were killed and 103,000 injured, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Deaths have more than doubled over the last ten years. During this same time, overall traffic fatalities dropped last year to their lowest level since 1994. Some attribute this overall decline to safer cars and less travel due to gasoline prices.

The number of registered motorcycles and scooters in the United States is nearly 7 million. Sales of new motorcycles rose every year between 1992 and 2006 and now tops more than a million annually.

Nursing homes care for the elderly and disabled, some of the most vulnerable persons in society. But, a recent report has disturbing news. More than 90 percent of nursing homes were cited for violations of federal health and safety standards last year according to a report issued by the federal government. For-profit nursing homes were more likely to have problems than other types of nursing homes.

The report revealed that about 17 percent of nursing homes had deficiencies that caused actual harm or immediate jeopardy to patients. Problems included infected bedsores, medication mix-ups, poor nutrition and abuse and neglect of patients.

Inspectors received 37,150 complaints about conditions in nursing homes last year, and they substantiated 39 percent of them.. About one-fifth of the complaints verified by federal and state authorities involved the abuse or neglect of patients.

Last night’s deadly charter bus crash in California reportedly killed at least ten passengers, after the bus veered from the road, and rolled over into a ditch. Predictably, passengers were ejected from the bus or tossed around inside the bus, which in our experience greatly increases the severity of injury.

In last year’s deadly bus accident involving the Bluffton University Baseball Team, our firm represents the most seriously injured surviving passenger. As we have written about previously, the NTSB found that the lack of seat belts or other passenger restraint systems, as well as type of materials used in windows, were factors in allowing passengers to be ejected from the bus.

Obviously, such basic equipment as seat belts saves lives–and yet somehow buses in this country continue to operate without them.

Three new lawsuits were filed in the state of California in September concerning the injectable diabetes drug Byetta. The lawsuits allege design defect and inadequate warnings of the drug’s alleged links to pancreatitis. The lawsuits name the manufacturer, Amylin, and the marketer, Eli Lilly, as the named defendants in the suit.
Byetta is a injectable drug for adult Type 2 diabetes. The principle ingredients of the drug are a derivative of the saliva of the Gila Monster, a lizard found in the southwestern United States. According to public information, approximately 1 million patients have used Byetta since it went on the market in June of 2005. The lawsuits pending against the named defendants are alleging that the defendants concealed from the public the extent of their knowledge concerning the possible linkage between the use of the drug and acute pancreatitis. In December, 2007, the United States Food and Drug Administration issued a Safety Alert indicating 30 reports of acute pancreatitis in connection with the use of this drug. In August, the FDA supplemented this safety alert by indicating an additional 6 adverse reports of pancreatitis.
If you or a loved one have used this drug and have developed acute pancreatitis, obviously, you may wish to confer with counsel concerning your legal rights. If the manufacturers were aware of a documented linkage between acute pancreatitis and the use of this drug, to the extent that they did not include warnings of this link to pancreatitis, there may be the valid basis of a claim against these defendants for a failure to warn of known dangers.

As Georgia trial lawyers we have handled a wide variety of slip and fall injury cases. While serious injuries from falls can occur at any age, it can be particularly serious for senior citizens. The elderly fear breaking a hip when they fall, but a government study indicates that hitting their head can also have deadly consequences: Brain injuries account for half of all deaths from falls. The study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is the first comprehensive national look at the role brain injuries play in fatal elderly falls. It examined 16,000 deaths in 2005 that listed unintentional falls as an underlying cause of death. CDC researchers found that slightly more than half of the deaths were attributed to brain injuries. The other deaths were due to a variety of causes including heart failure, strokes, infections and existing chronic conditions worsened by a broken hip or other injuries sustained in a fall.
Each year, one in three Americans age 65 and older fall. About 30 percent of such falls require medical treatment. Previous CDC research showed that the U.S. death rate from falling has risen dramatically – about 55 percent – for the elderly since the 1990s. The new study highlights the role that brain injuries play in such deaths. The severity of brain injuries isn’t always immediately apparent, and some people may not lose consciousness. In our practice we have repeatedly noted a scenario seen in hospitals in which an elderly fall victim comes in alert and talking, but dies an hour or two later. The research is being published in the June issue of a scientific publication, the Journal of Safety Research.

Not only must Georgia car accident, truck accident, and other personal injury victims fight the insurance companies to get a fair shake, but now days they must also swim against the tide of so-called “tort reform.” Brainwashed by propaganda, bought and paid for by the most dangerous industries and their insurers, potential jurors naturally come into court believing that all injured litigants are exaggerating – or worse. Sadly, we taxpayers often end up paying the medical and other bills that the wantonly, careless and dangerous today escape having to pay, thanks to “tort reform.” As an example, insurance companies recently tried to deny workers compensation benefits to the dependants of undocumented hispanic workers who were killed or seriously injured on-the-job. Fortunately, the Georgia Court of Appeals did not buy their arguments and recognized that it as another attempt for insurance companies who received a premium for the coverage, to shift the financial responsibility to state and federal government and taxpayers.
Car accidents and other personal injury victims normally require expensive healthcare, and lose pay checks while unable to work. If the insurer for the careless driver, dangerous company, defective product manufacturer or other “injury-causer” is not held liable for the injury, then the victim likely will have no choice but to let Medicaid pick up the healthcare tab, and let the Social Security system pay disability benefits to replace earnings. The bottom line is that either the “injury causer” pays, or you and I do. Another reality, unknown to most of the public, is that juries are kept in the dark about insurance companies’ involvement in almost all personal injury trials. Even though an insurer actually is behind the entire fight in almost all personal injury cases – paying for the defense lawyer and any judgment ultimately collected – the jurors never are told this in a typical personal injury trial. Furthermore, the injured person has to sue the actual “injury causer” himself, and not his insurance company. In actuality, insurance companies are intimately involved in all litigation, including selection and hiring “expert witnesses”, including physicians, to testify and give favorable “expert opinions”at trial. Most Georgia attorneys who handle personal injury, workers compensation and serious injury cases recognize the names of these “hired guns” because insurance companies use them over and over. Many of the “experts” earn a substantial part of their annual income doing nothing but “independent” medical examinations and then testifying.
We believe it is time for the public to learn the truth about these issues that is based upon hard evidence – data that is not the propaganda of those with a financial interest in not paying just claims. Along those lines, one article that appears to be an extensive and well documented resource on the truth about “tort reform” is “The Frivolous Case for Tort Law Change,” published in May of 2005 by the Economic Policy Institute. In it are many other resources documenting this simple fact: “Tort reform” clearly is a very elaborate, and successful, propaganda war being waged by those who either have political agendas and aspirations and those with a financial interest in not paying the claims of innocent people who have been injured and damaged by the negligence of others.