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 is at its highest since 1984. Brain-injury rates fell precipitously following the ban of head-first tackles and blocks in high-school and college football in 1976, but have been rising since, with tackling and “tackling head down” accounting for a combined 59.8 percent of the injuries.

NCCSIR Director Frederick Mueller, a professor of exercise and sports science, told the Wall Street Journal that the probable reason greater numbers of high-school footballers are suffering brain damage on the gridiron is that the players, in imitation of professionals, are using their heads more. Mueller said coaches and officials needed should take measures to prevent brain injuries.

Has your child been harmed as a result of school neglect? Contact the personal-injury attorneys at Hodes Milman Liebeck toll-free at (866) 730-1976, or submit the contact form on our website, hml-lawyers.com. We’ve achieved million-dollar verdicts in product liability actions on behalf of our clients.

“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 the drug’s detractors were vindicated last summer when post-market reports forced the agency to attach to the medication warnings about pancreatitis, thyroid cancer and renal failure.

Those dangers (along with severe allergic reactions) are cited in a petition filed with the FDA in April asking the agency to pull Victoza from the market.

“More and more people are taking this drug, and more people are experiencing serious health problems as a result,” Dr. Sidney Wolfe, of petition-filing group Public Citizen, said in a statement (Approximately two million prescriptions of Victoza are filled each year). “Clearly, the FDA’s warning system is not sufficient. The drug should be taken off the market.”

Have you been harmed by Victoza or another dangerous drug? Contact Hodes Milman Liebeck for a free case evaluation. We’re aggressive personal-injury and medical-malpractice lawyers based in Orange County, serving all of California. We have the experience to take on the medical industry and have achieved multi-million dollar verdicts for our clients.

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 Highway Traffic Safety Administration, a nut in the wiper apparatus could loosen and the wiper might stop working.

Here’s the catch: In what’s called a “regional recall,” GM said it would repair only cars in states it had determined have “moderate to heavy annual snowfall.” The New York Times reported that the automaker has sold approximately 295,000 Enclaves, Traverses and Acadias from the 2011-2012 model years, meaning the defective wipers will go unfixed on the roughly 245,000 cars presumably in states the automaker has deemed have less than moderate yearly snowfall.

Have you or a loved one been harmed by a defective vehicle? What if you knew that was the result of corporate corner-cutting? Contact the personal injury attorneys at Hodes Milman Liebeck toll-free at (866) 730-1976, or submit the contact form on our website, hml-lawyers.com. We’ve achieved million-dollar verdicts in product-liability actions on behalf of our clients.

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 installed at the top of the staircase.

“We have much more that we need to do to make the home environment safer for children,” Dr. Gary Smith, the study’s lead author, told The New York Times. He advised parents of young children to make sure their stair railings are thin enough to wrap their hand around completely, and to always use wall-mounted gates—never the less-secure pressure-mounted gates—at the top of their stairs.

Has your child suffered a staircase-related injury due to a defective product or another person’s negligence? Contact the personal injury attorneys at Hodes Milman Liebeck toll-free at (866) 730 1976, or submit the contact form on our website, hml-lawyers.com. We’ve achieved million-dollar verdicts in product liability actions on behalf of our clients.

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 surgery to fix a hernia suffer from chronic pain and restricted movement afterward.

Doctors should not understate the risks of this procedure by telling patients, as they often do, “it’s just a hernia,” B. Todd Heniford, president of the American Hernia Society, recently told the Wall Street Journal. “This is not a 100-percent benign procedure,” he said. “We need to help patients weight the potential risks and benefits of surgery and say no if they need to.”

Did your doctor minimize a surgical procedure’s risks? Contact Hodes Milman Liebeck for a free case evaluation. We’re aggressive personal injury and medical malpractice lawyers based in Orange County, serving all of California. We have the experience to take on the medical industry and have achieved multi-million dollar verdicts for our clients.

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.

Now, Worthington Cylinders Wisconsin has issued a related recall for more than 30 million of its Map Pro, Propylene and MAPP gas cylinders. The company has learned that the seal on the cylinders can leak after the torches are unattached from them, creating a fire hazard.

Have you or somebody you know been injured or killed by a MAPP gas cylinder explosion? Contact Hodes Milman Liebeck at (866) 730-1976, or submit the contact form on our website, hml-lawyers.com. We are at the forefront of litigation against MAPP gas cylinder manufacturers and currently represent more people harmed by MAPP explosions than any firm in the country.

For more information, visit our website about the MAPP lawsuits.

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 devices later shown to be dangerous had been approved by the FDA through irregular procedures, asked House leaders last fall to hold hearings on the devices’ safety.

Even in the face of these findings and the Feds, the FDA and the Wingspan system’s manufacturer, Stryker, have failed to act. They’ve suggested that the study’s subjects cannot be compared with the patients the system was approved to treat.

Have you been harmed by the Wingspan Stent System or another medical product? Contact Hodes Milman Liebeck for a free case evaluation. We’re aggressive personal injury and medical malpractice lawyers based in Orange County, serving all of California. We have the experience to take on the medical industry and have achieved multi-million dollar verdicts for our clients.

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 Practitioner Data Bank Public Use File uncovered that in the past two decades, state medical boards failed to take action against more than 5,000 doctors who had been disciplined at their workplace—including 220 who were deemed an “immediate threat to health or safety of patients.”

Have you been harmed as a result of a doctor’s negligence? Contact Hodes Milman Liebeck for a free case evaluation. We’re aggressive personal injury and medical malpractice lawyers based in Orange County, serving all of California. We have the experience to take on the medical industry and have achieved multi-million dollar verdicts for our clients.