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Defibrillator Blamed in Deaths

Beth Janicek — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 10:32:00 GMT

Zoll Medical Corp. said recently that some of its defibrillators have defective batteries and software. The AED Plus external defibrillator, which is used in public settings such as airports, schools, and health clubs, failed to deliver a shock to two patients, leading to their deaths. The two deaths are among four reports received by Zoll in which a shock failed to be delivered to a patient.

According to Bloomberg.com, Zoll began asking customers on February 12 to download software which can be used to detect a potential defect in their defibrillator’s battery. More than 180,000 defibrillators may be affected, with the greatest risk attributable to 80,000 units that have been installed for more than 3 years. The defects include batteries that do not work and self testing software that fails to detect malfunctioning batteries.

The free software updates designed to check the AED plus defibrillator can be downloaded at this website.

Every year between 250,000 and 450,000 Americans experience a sudden heart stoppage or cardiac arrest. Cardiac arrest is caused by rhythm disturbance or silent coronary artery disease. 95 percent of people who suffer a cardiac arrest die, but defibrillators are designed to deliver a shock to the person and thereby restore normal heart rhythm. Having quick access to a working defibrillator can be the difference between life and death. Hopefully, Zoll is doing everything they can to inform the public of this issue so that no more lives are lost.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Beth Janicek

Rottweiler Kills Three Year Old

Beth Janicek — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 11:07:56 GMT

I was deeply saddened when I read this weekend of a three year old that was killed by a Rottweiler in Fort Worth. I have handled cases in the past when people have been bitten by a Rottweiller, on the other hand I have friends who have Rottweiler’s as pets and are quick to defend any accusations that their pet would harm a sole. The studies I found had Rottweilers and Pit Bulls at the top of the list for inflicting injury. Another interesting point I found was that Texas leads the nation with seven deaths last year. The research also concluded that states with the One Bite Law had more attacks than the states with Strict Liability Laws. According to research by Merritt Clifton, two thirds of the fatal attacks were the first known dangerous behavior by the animal in question. This research would infer that tougher laws in Texas like the majority of states might lead to fewer attacks.

Merritt Clifton research indicted that the pit bulls and rottweilers have more attacks and inflict more severe injury. He argues that we should not encourage people to own these species due to the risk.

“Temperament is not the issue, nor is it even relevant. What is relevant is actuarial risk. If almost any other dog has a bad moment, someone may get bitten, but will not be maimed for life or killed, and the actuarial risk is accordingly reasonable. If a pit bull terrier or a Rottweiler has a bad moment, often someone is maimed or killed--and that has now created off-the-chart actuarial risk, for which the dogs as well as their victims are paying the price.”

I do not want to ban these dogs but I would like to see Texas enact a strict liability law. It may not eliminate these attacks but is more likely to provide compensation to the most likely victim which is children. Frankly, I can’t find an argument against it.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Beth Janicek

Motorcycle Accidents and Helmet Laws

Beth Janicek — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 16:21:24 GMT

Just this morning while looking through the news, I found three articles relating to motorcycle accident deaths in central Texas. The first was a U.S. Army soldier, Luke D. Yustin, 25, from Killeen, Texas who died on Friday in a motorcycle crash in Gillespie County. In the second accident, Errin Johnson, 34, was killed, and her husband, Gerald Johnson, 36, a Bandera County deputy, was seriously injured when their motorcycle was struck from behind by a truck over the weekend. The third motorcycle accident resulting in a fatality this weekend occurred in San Antonio, when Jeffrey McCarty, 47, crashed his motorcycle into an ambulance.

These accidents were extremely unfortunate events that regrettably took the lives of three people. Reading these articles made me wonder whether or not these people were wearing helmets, and what the statistics are regarding motorcycle accidents and the use of helmets.

While researching motorcycle accidents and helmet laws I found that the federal government estimates that per mile traveled, the number of deaths on motorcycles in 2006 was about 35 times the number in cars. In fact, the number of motorcyclist deaths has been rising in recent years, and in 2007, there were more deaths in motorcycle accidents than in any year since the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) began collecting fatal crash data.

Helmets can decrease the severity of head injuries, the likelihood of death, and the overall cost of medical care. NHTSA has estimated that helmets can reduce the likelihood of a fatal crash by 37%. It is important to know what the helmet laws are in your state if you are considering riding a motorcycle. If your state has a universal helmet law, than a helmet is required for all riders. Partial helmet laws usually only require people under the age of 18 to wear a helmet. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has provided an interactive map detailing each state’s helmet laws.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Beth Janicek

Motorists: Share the Road and Give Clearance to Cyclists

Beth Janicek — Mon, 11 May 2009 16:21:57 GMT

An article in the San Antonio Express News caught my eye this weekend regarding Senate Bill 488 – the Safe Passing Bill. As a cyclist and runner, I am a proponent of the bill which heads to the House after a recent Senate victory. The bill requires commercial vehicles and large trucks at least six feet clearance to groups including bicyclists, pedestrians, runners, motorcyclists and construction workers. All other vehicles are required to give them three feet.

Violators will be handed a $500 fine. If the crash causes injuries, motorist will be charged with a Class B misdemeanor with a maximum penalty of 180 days in jail and a $2000 fine.

This weekend off 1604 and Highway 16, a motorist driving an SUV sideswiped two cyclists in their late 40s. They were driving on the shoulder when the 2003 Jeep Liberty swerved off the road and struck them. The driver did stop and call 911. Both cyclists were flow to Wilford Hall Medical Center, one with head and knee injuries and the other with chest pains and possibly broken ribs. The driver of the SUV was ticketed $190 and charged with failure to maintain a single lane.

A preliminary Texas Department of Transportation report showed 50 bicyclists in Texas were killed and another 274 suffered incapacitating injuries. In the 50 bicyclists killed, 20 of those were caused by motorists not passing safely.

“More people are cycling all the time. We want to make sure that crashes and fatalities don't go up with that increased cycling,” Stallings said. “The best way to do that is to begin to educate at the earliest levels.”

Other similar bills regarding vulnerable road users have been held up in the Legislature since 2003, but Rep. Linda Harper-Brown, one of the author’s of the bill is “somewhat confident” it will pass before the session ends June 1.

I will be following up with additional blog posts on this topic as more information arises. Stay tuned.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Beth Janicek

Medical Malpractice Insurers’ Profits Higher than 99% of All Fortune 500 Companies

Beth Janicek — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 17:58:31 GMT

The American Association for Justice (AAJ) recently released a statistic claiming that medical malpractice insurance companies’ average profits are higher than 99 percent of all Fortune 500 companies. AAJ points out that medical malpractice lawsuits only account for a small percentage of unnecessary costs. The bigger problem is medical errors and the profits of malpractice insurers.

The report released by the AAJ also states that the average profit of medical malpractice insurance companies is 35 time higher than the Fortune 500 average for the same time period, and that malpractice insurers have seen their profit margins range from 5.9 percent to 74.8 percent, with an average of 31.2 percent. In addition, the report finds that malpractice insurers have publicly overestimated their losses and underestimated their profits in an attempt to suggest that insurance business and medical practices face a crisis that must be resolved by tort reform. This report released by the AAJ shows that insurance companies profit the most, and obviously need Tort Reform the least.

AAJ President Anthony Tarricone said,

Insurance companies are gouging doctors on their premiums to mislead lawmakers…And today, injured patients are often left with no avenue to pursue justice, while health care costs continue to skyrocket.”

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Beth Janicek

Bill Would Allow Military Personnel to Sue for Medical Malpractice

Beth Janicek — Wed, 20 May 2009 11:10:18 GMT

Legislation that would enable military service members to sue the government for medical malpractice is moving closer to becoming law. The House Judiciary Subcommittee approved Carmelo Rodriguez Military Medical Accountability Act. The legal precedence barring negligence lawsuits for military service members goes back to a 1950 Supreme Court ruling known as the Feres Doctrine.

The Feres ruling came from the Federal Tort Claims Act of 1946, which waived the common law doctrine of sovereign immunity in certain circumstances to allow lawsuits against the government for negligent acts. The law was initially interpreted to forbid lawsuits by military personnel only for combat-related injuries. The Feres decision extended the law to include any lawsuits for injuries “incident to military service.”

Over the years cases applying the Feres Doctrine have include incidents such as leaving foreign objects inside patients, misdiagnosing, failure to notify patients about potentially deadly health problems, and failure to treat patients with easily treatable illnesses.

The Feres Doctrine has received criticism all across the board. Attempts to revoke the doctrine have surfaced periodically in Congress for over 20 years, but all have failed. In 1987, a 5-4 Supreme Court decision reaffirmed the Doctrine. The decision drew dissents from Justices John Paul Stevens and Antonin Scalia.

Scalia wrote that the Feres Doctrine “was wrongly decided and heartily deserves the widespread, almost universal criticism it has received.”

The latest attempt to amend the Feres Doctrine is H.R. 1478, the “Carmelo Rodriguez Military Medical Accountability Act of 2009”, introduced by U.S. Representative Maurice Hinchey (D-N.Y). The Act would allow lawsuits on behalf of military personnel who are killed or injured by medical malpractice but would contain an exception for combat-related injuries. It also requires that any paid claim be reduced by the amount of any other government compensation resulting from the injury.

U.S. Rep. Hinchey said, “I think military personnel should be treated in normal ways. Their medical issues should be dealt with responsively and attentively, the way we anticipate and expect the medical problems of ordinary citizens should be dealt with. We see far too much negligence in military medical care.”

Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University, has been a leading critic of the Feres Doctrine for years.

He said, “We see cases in the military involving conduct that would be viewed as perfectly medieval in the civilian world. Decades ago civilian doctors were sued over the practice of leaving sponges in patients. It used to be very common.”

Now, he says, it is rare to see that type of malpractice in civilian medicine, due to the fear of lawsuits. But since there is no fear of a lawsuit in military medicine, it keeps occurring.

Turley said, “I consider the Feres Doctrine to be one of the most grotesque rules created in the history of this republic. It has done untold damage to thousands of military personnel and their families.”

Let’s hope for the sake of our military that the Carmelo Rodriguez Military Accountability Act of 2009 has a better outcome than other bills written to overturn the Feres Doctrine. Rep. Hinchey admits that this bill is going to face a tough fight, but as far as he is concerned it is simply a matter of fairness.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Beth Janicek

Lillian’s Law on Dog Attacks

Beth Janicek — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 10:01:22 GMT

After blogging on dog attacks, I realized the extent of this controversial topic. I found another sad article on Tanner Monk, a 7-year old mauled to death last May near his home in Breckenridge by four pit bulls owned by Crystal Watson and Jack Smith. Crystal and Jack lived out in the country and never thought twice about letting their dogs run loose. I am certain Tanner Monk’s family would have liked them to think twice about it.

Under Lillian's law, named after Lillian Stiles who was also killed by a pack of dogs, owners can face up to 20 years if their dogs get off their property and attack “unprovoked”. Crystal and Jack received a seven year sentence but they are free on an appeals bond. Most dog owners are not aware of Lillian’s law nor the extent of punishment.

Owners should be held accountable for their dogs, regardless of the breed. Due to the size and strength of pit bulls, whether their dogs have shown aggressive behavior, owners should be overly cautious. I did a previous blog that on the civil side, I believe Texas needs to pass litigation to hold owners strictly liable for any injury their dog inflicts.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Beth Janicek

Texas Has the Most 18-wheeler Traffic Fatalities

Beth Janicek — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 17:28:17 GMT

If you commute to work, especially on I-35 or I-10, you probably see many 18-wheeler trucks traveling in both directions. In traffic or out of traffic, fast or slow; big rigs can be intimidating, and if an accident does occur, most passenger cars are not equipped to take on one of these rigs. With problems such as truckers speeding and tailgating, our highways become a dangerous place to share with a vehicle that weighs over 80,000 pounds.

In 2007, Texas had the most traffic fatalities involving an 18-wheeler than any other state. Last year in Texas there were a total of 4845 traffic fatalities, 455 of those involved an 18-wheeler, as reported by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Across the nation last year one out of every nine traffic fatalities involved an 18-wheeler. In addition, 101,000 people in America were injured in an accident with a big-rig.

For more information, check out this website for Road Safe America, an organization dedicated to making the roads safer for passenger cars and trucks. They are joining with the leading trucking companies in a major effort to make the nation's highways safer by petitioning for trucking industry regulations that would slow the maximum speed of large trucks. According to their website:

When tractor-trailers and cars collide in a fatal crash, 98 percent of the fatalities occur in the cars. It's clear why: for a car to have the force of a tractor-trailer, which weighs 80,000 pounds, traveling at 60 mph, it would have to be speeding at over 300 mph. Limiting trucks to reasonable speeds will make our highways significantly safer while preserving truckers' important jobs.

This is one regulation that would certainly make me feel a little safer on the roadway.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Beth Janicek

Medical Errors Cause Hundreds of Preventable Deaths

Beth Janicek — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 17:15:05 GMT

According tot the Patient Safety in American Hospitals Study, patient safety errors resulted in 238,337 potentially preventable deaths of U.S Medicare patients from 2004 to 2006. Additionally, the medical errors cost the Medicare program $8.8 billion.

Healthgrades evaluated 41 million Medicare patient records and found that patients treated at top-performing hospitals were 43 percent less likely to experience one or more medical errors than patients at the poorest-performing hospitals.

Further findings included:

“Patients who experienced a patient safety incident had a 20 percent chance of dying as a result of the incident. The overall death rate among patients who experienced one or more patient safety incidents fell by almost 5 percent between 2004 and 2006.However, over that time, there were increases in post-operative respiratory failure, post-operative pulmonary embolism or deep vein thrombosis, post-operative sepsis (blood infection), and post-operative abdominal wound separation/splitting. The most common types of medical errors were bed sores, failure to rescue, and post-operative respiratory failure.”

The report supports other studies which have found that hospitals have an alarming rate of medical errors which result in hundreds of deaths. Further investigation is needed to discover why incidents have increased in post-operative respiratory failure, post-operative pulmonary embolism or deep vein thrombosis, post-operative sepsis (blood infection), and post-operative abdominal wound separation/splitting so that improvements can be made and lives can be saved. One of the benefits of medical malpractice litigation is to investigate why medical errors occur so as to prevent the error from being made in the future.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Beth Janicek

Toyota’s Largest Ever Recall of Vehicles

Beth Janicek — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 13:25:18 GMT

Toyota Motor Corp. claims the gas pedal design in more than 4 million Toyota and Lexus vehicles makes them vulnerable to being trapped open by floor mats. On Wednesday it announced a costly recall to fix the problem. Although Toyota has repeatedly pointed to “floor mat entrapment” as the problem over unintended acceleration events, more people are beginning to believe that the potential cause is the electronic throttle system that has replaced mechanical systems in recent years.

A Times review of thousands of federal traffic safety incident reports found that complaints of sudden acceleration in many Toyota and Lexus vehicles shot up almost immediately after the automaker adopted the drive-by-wire system over the last decade. The electronic system uses sensors, microprocessors and electric motors, instead of a steel cable used in mechanical systems to connect the driver’s foot to the engine. Reports of unintended acceleration increased more than fivefold for some Toyota models, after drive-by-wire systems were adopted.

Brian Lyons, Toyota spokesman, said the automaker could not explain the trend, but has consistently held that the electronic control systems are not to blame. Toyota released a statement this month saying,

“Six times in the past six years NHTSA has undertaken an exhaustive review of allegations of unintended acceleration on Toyota and Lexus vehicles. Six times the agency closed the investigation without finding any electronic engine control system malfunction to be the cause of unintended acceleration.”

In my opinion, Toyota’s recall is focusing on the wrong problems. In January they plan to cut nearly an inch off the lower edge of the gas pedal and adjust the width to reduce the risk that the floor mat will become caught on the gas pedal. They will also install a brake override system meant to ensure that the engine will lose power if the brake and the accelerator are applied simultaneously, which will become standard on all Toyota and Lexus models by the end of next year. I hope that these adjustments will be enough to reduce the amount of accidents occurring from sudden acceleration. However, since there have been reports of sudden acceleration in cars that have removed their floor mats, I do not understand how changing the gas pedal will make a difference. I think that Toyota needs to do extensive research on the electronic throttle system in order to find the underlying problem causing these acceleration events.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Beth Janicek