Personal Injury & Wrongful Death

At least19 people have died, and hundreds became ill after being given heparin, a blood-thinning drug sold by drug manufacturer Baxter International. Baxter obtained the drug’s active ingredient from a Chinese manufacturer.

A belated inspection of the Chinese plant found substandard conditions. Recent lab tests revealed an unknown contaminant in batches of the drug, but researchers have not identified what precisely caused the allergic reactions which caused the deaths.

The Food and Drug Administration is required to inspect plants such as the one in China which supplied the heparin ingredient. However, under the Bush Administration, it has failed to follow this mandate.

Currently, 80 percent of all active drug ingredients come from abroad, but the FDA doesn’t know what percentage of foreign manufacturing facilities it has inspected. Many of these plants are in developing countries that don’t have infrastructure that meets U.S. safety standards.
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Many surgery patients report that they awake during surgery. They say it feels like being trapped in a corpse, unable to move or scream. Some remember hearing their surgeons talk, and a few recall feeling intense pain.

Each year, as many as 40,000 of the 21 million patients undergoing surgery in the United States may experience inadequate anesthesia, leading to anxiety and even post-traumatic stress disorder if patients regain consciousness, according to the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations.
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It seems that everyday our personal injury lawyers open the paper, we read about another wrongful death in the context of a high speed police chase. One such case occurred this past weekend in Augusta, Georgia when a Sheriff’s Deputy was chasing a 19-year old suspect. Initially the officer involved pulled the suspect over and was provided his ID and driver’s license. Thus, the officer knew who the suspect was and where he lived. While the officer went back to his car to
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In February of this year, an active member of the military at Fort Benning, Sgt. Joanna Joy Ringer, age 21, was reportedly killed as yet another innocent victim in a police chase case. This time, the, innocent victim, Ms. Ringer, was killed because the police were chasing a 17 year old teenager for joyriding in a stolen pickup truck. Ms. Ringer, like all such victims, was simply at the wrong place, at the wrong time when the fleeing suspect ran head on into her car.
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Our personal injury lawyers read today about a serious accident case involving an overturned school bus which apparently lost control and overturned about 40 miles north of Atlanta near Canton, Georgia. It was traveling from one high school to a middle school when the accident happened. When the bus overturned, even though no students were ejected from the bus, according to initial reports, approximately 25 students were injured. Two were reported to be in critical condition.
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In 2006, a disabled and brain damaged man, near death, was taken into an operating room at a California hospital in order to harvest his organs for donation. Law enforcement officials contend that what occurred in the operating room was a criminal act. The surgeon, Dr. Hootan Roozrokh has been criminally charged with prescribing excessive and improper doses of drugs, apparently in an attempt to hasten Mr. Navarro’s death to retrieve his organs sooner. The doctor is facing three felony counts relating to his actions Central to the case is whether Dr. Roozrokh was pursuing organs at any cost or had become entangled in a web of misunderstanding about a lesser-used harvesting technique known as donation after cardiac death. Dr. Roozrokh has pleaded not guilty.
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Last Wednesday the Supreme Court of the United States made it harder for injury and wrongful death victims to sue manufacturers of federally approved medical devices. This decision will also impact cases involving dangerous drugs. The issue before the Supreme Court was whether the Estate of Charles Riegel could sue a company under state law over a medical device which had previously been cleared for sale by federal regulators. Under federal law, a company must prove the safety and effectiveness of a medical device
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Atlanta TV stations are reporting that this afternoon, a car veered into a bus stop during a police chase and struck four pedestrians. The incident was near Metropolitan Parkway and University Drive.

According to reports, the Atlanta Police were chasing three juveniles in a stolen vehicle when the car ran into the bus stop. One juvenile was apprehended at the scene while two others escaped.

Four of the people involved were injured, one critically. This is another instance of innocent civilians harmed and/or killed by police chases for non-violent offenses. The victims could have easily been your family members.
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In January of this year, the FDA issued a proposed rule which directly contradicts Congress’ expressed intent when it passed the Food and Drug Administration Amendment’s Act of 2007 (FDAAA). Unlike the FDA’s proposed rule, Congress intended the duty to warn customers of a drug’s hazards rests with the drug company, who is in the best position to warn about problems associated with the drug. However, under the FDA rule, drug companies will enjoy more relaxed labeling requirements and will use the rule to claim immunity for failing to warn patients of potential drug hazards. The FDAAA requires a drug company to update its label to include drug hazard warnings as soon as there is reasonable evidence of that risk. This law allows consumers to be aware of a drug’s potential risks at the earliest possible moment and prevents injuries and deaths such as those associated with Avandia and Vioxx. However, under the new FDA rule, drug companies will only have to revise their warning label where they establish “sufficient evidence of a causal association” which could take years. This is a significantly higher standard that drug companies would have to meet before informing consumers of a potential hazard. It is imperative that Congress hold oversight hearings to curb this agency’s abuse of power because the FDA has ignored expressed Congressional intent and this proposed rule will not serve to make drugs safer. Instead the proposed rule will make it more difficult for consumers injured by prescription drugs to hold negligent drug companies accountable.
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Two studies have concluded that heart surgery patients are more likely to die if given the anti-bleeding drug Trasylol. The drug has been widely used for the last 14 years to treat hundreds of thousands of heart bypass patients each year. Drug manufacturer Bayer AG ceased sales of the last fall, after a Canadian study was halted because of deaths among patients taking Trasylol.
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