Blog

2012-05-15
New report suggests high-school football coaches and officials fumbling on student safety
We trust schools to take good care of our kids—to supervise them adequately and give them sound, safe advice. Schools, however, don’t always prove themselves worthy of that trust. Case in point: A new report suggests that high-school football coaches might not be instructing student-athletes in safe, head-free shoulder tackling and blocking, and that officials might not be calling penalties on head-first hits as much as they should. According to the report, which comes from the University of North Carolina’s National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research (NCCSIR), the number of high-school football players suffering catastrophic brain injuries while playing
2012-05-08
FDA ignores own advisors’ advice, eats slice of humble pie
When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was deciding in 2010 whether to approve the diabetes drug Victoza, two of the agency’s pharmacologists and one of its clinical safety reviewers advised against it, pointing to the Novo Nordisk-manufactured medication’s serious risks. “In the United States, there are already 11 classes of drugs approved for glycemic control in type 2 diabetes,” the clinical safety reviewer wrote. “The need for new therapies for type 2 diabetes is not so urgent that one must tolerate a significant degree of uncertainty regarding serious risk concerns.” The FDA went ahead and approved Victoza anyway, but
2012-05-01
When customer safety comes below the bottom line
We’ve seen it time and time again: Corporations, given the chance, will put their bottom line above their customers’ safety. General Motors only belabored the point, then, when in April the automaker issued a type of recall that safety advocates allege is a tactic for corporations to avoid the cost of a comprehensive recall. GM recalled about 50,000 Buick Enclave, Chevrolet Traverse and GMC Acadia crossovers from the 2011-2012 model years because their windshield wipers could fail in snowy or icy conditions. If snow or ice accumulated on the windshield, the company said in a report filed with the National
2012-04-24
Stepping up staircase safety prevents child injuries
Almost 100,000 children per year are brought to a hospital with staircase-related injuries, a new study has found. The study, based on data from emergency rooms nationwide and published recently in the journal Pediatrics, is the first to examine stair injuries among kids (Previous research has focused on the elderly). Its findings are disquieting: Between 1999 and 2008, about 932,000 kids younger than 5 got hurt on stairs—approximately a child every six minutes. This is in large part because many homes cannot be adequately childproofed: Two-thirds of houses, for example, are designed such that a wall-mounted stair gate can’t be
2012-04-17
Studies show that hernia surgery is riskier than doctors say
Just as there’s no such thing as a free lunch, there is no such thing as a risk-free surgical procedure.Doctors, however, don’t always make that clear. Consider hernia-repair surgery, a procedure to correct a fairly commonly occurring protrusion of intestine or fat at a weak spot in the abdomen. More than a million patients a year undergo hernia repair; it’s among the most common surgical procedures. What many of those people don’t know, though, is that the surgery, widely considered a minor procedure, poses a major risk: chronic post-surgical pain. Studies show more than 30 percent of patients who have
2012-04-10
New recall brings needed attention to MAPP gas cylinders’ extreme danger
Bombs are ticking away in garages across America right now. They might not look like bombs, it’s true. But these devices, called MAPP gas cylinders and used by plumbers, mechanics and do-it-yourselfers for heating, soldering, brazing and welding, are as incendiary as TNT: They are known to sometimes explode, injuring or killing the user. The manufacturers of MAPP gas cylinders, Worthington Cylinders and Western Industries, have been aware for years of the defect that instigates these explosions. They didn’t recall the product until January, though—too late for the dozens of people who had already been injured or killed by it.
2012-04-03
Failing to pull brain implant from market, FDA endangers patients
The Food and Drug Administration still has not removed from the market a brain implant that apparently helps prevent strokes—in spite of a study indicating the device is dangerous. The study published in the New England Journal of Medicine last fall, concluded that patients implanted with the Wingspan Stent System carried a 2.5-times-higher risk of having a stroke or dying within 30 days than those without the implant. The findings alarmed the researchers that they cut off enrollment in the study early. Also alarmed were members of Congress. A group of them, noting that the Wingspan system and other medical
2012-03-28
Senators ask regulators to ensure bad doctors get punished
We’ve blogged before about how slack supervision of state medical boards, which are charged with disciplining negligent doctors, has permitted many physicians who have acted improperly to go unpunished. Now, the issue is attracting notice from members of Congress. Since the 1980s, although the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General has done a few investigations of state medical boards, it has not comprehensively evaluated them. A bipartisan trio of U.S. senators last month moved to end that dereliction of duty, asking the department to start actively overseeing the boards again. A recent analysis of the National
2012-03-21
Door fires spread to Toyotas
Car fires traced to faulty power-window master switches in Honda vehicles have forced the carmaker to recall nearly one million cars over the last two years. The fires even killed one person in South Africa. Now, a similar defect is appearing in Toyotas. Blazes have been igniting in the driver’s-side door of Toyota vehicles, again possibly because of a malfunction of the master switch that controls the power windows. Consumer complaints and reports from Toyota itself have prompted the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to launch an investigation. Camrys, Solaras and RAV4s from the 2007 model year are affected—a total