New York Personal Injury Lawyer Blog

Supplementing our February 29, 2008 post "Blood Thinner Heparin Tied To Several Deaths", the actor Dennis Quaid appeared on "60 Minutes" last Sunday to reveal every parent's nightmare: He and his wife almost lost their newborn twins last year at Cedar's Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles due to a massive overdose of the blood thinner Heparin, manufactured by Baxter International.

The nurses were supposed to give the twins a dosage of "Hep-Lock", a weak form of Heparin to keep IV lines open. Instead, they gave the twins Heparin in a dosage which Quaid described as "10,000 times the normal dosage", causing a drug overdose which could have been fatal. Apparently the almost tragic mistake was caused by the very similar blue backgrounds on the vials of Hep-Lock and Heparin. Quaid said that "our kids were bleeding from everyplace they were punctured...it was blood everywhere."

Shockingly, this same event occurred in Indianapolis a year earlier, which resulted in the deaths of three infants. Despite this fact, Baxter International, being sued by the Quaids in a multi-million dollar defective product lawsuit, did not change the colors of the two vials until after the Quaid twins incident--now, one vial is red and the other is blue, making a mistake by nurses much less likely.

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The Journal Archives of Surgery published a study on March 17th which found that a year after an injury in a car accident, slip and fall or other types of accidents, 63 percent reported that they still had substantial pain related to the injury. The over 3,000 patients studied were 18 to 84 years of age, who had survived a traumatic injury.

The people in the study suffered head injuries, broken limbs, chest or abdominal trauma and other injuries in motor vehicle crashes, slip/trip and fall accidents and other circumstances. The most common areas of pain were in the joints and limbs (44 %), the back (26 %), the head (12 %), and the neck (7 %).

The American Pain Foundation, a Baltimore-based advocacy group, said the financial cost of chronic pain in the United States, including lost income, health care expenses and lost productivity in the workplace, is estimated to be $100 billion per year. According to this foundation, back pain is the leading cause of disability in Americans under 45 years old.

In our practice, we are frequently battling with insurance companies in New York car accidents who want to cut our clients off from No-Fault benefits based on a negative MRI despite the fact that it is abundantly clear that the client is still in significant pain--without any objective proof of this pain such as positive X-rays, CAT Scans, or MRI's. In these situations, our recommendation to our clients is simple: you must continue to treat with your chiropractor, physical therapist, physiatrist, or acupuncturist, in order to alleviate the pain and establish the evidence necessary to meet the "No-Fault Threshold"--the requirement in order to recover compensation for injuries in a New York car accident.

On March 15, 2008, in a fatal New York construction accident, a construction crane collapsed on East 51rst Street in Manhattan, killied seven people and injuring several others. Aides to the Manhattan borough president, Scott Stringer, said they had been told by the Office of Emergency Management that the crane fell on two buildings, destroying one at 305 East 50th Street and partly collapsing the building at 301 East 50th Street. The big white crane which fell appeared to be about 20 stories tall, according to onlookers. Firefighters carried stretchers at the scene of the accident, as people were feared to be trapped beneath the wreckage. Apparently, just before the crane collapsed, it was lifting material that apparently fell and struck a girder that connected the crane to the building.

Construction has increasingly become a deadly business -- especially in New York, where laborers routinely dangle from skyscrapers, all part of a building boom that has defied the national slowdown. In January, in another New York fatal construction accident, high-rise concrete forms collapsed at the site of Donald Trump's hotel and condo complex in Lower Manhattan. An Ukrainian immigrant worker who was the father of several children was decapitated as he plunged 42 stories to his death. Three others were injured.
Two months earlier, another immigrant worker was killed when he fell 15 stories, prompting the creation of a task force to cut down on scaffolding accidents.

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The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services USCIS acknowledged that due to a huge increase in applications for green cards and citizenship in July of 2007, the average waiting time for legal residency and citizenship is now 18 months. The surge in applications in July of 2007 (7 times more than the average month), which resulted in the increased waiting time from approximately 7 months to 18 months, was due to applicants submitting their papers just before the almost 50% increase in fees on July 30, 2007.

The USCIS has been under fire for not anticipating and planning for the huge increase in applications last July, although they did hire 750 additional agents for the sole purpose of working on applications. Michael Aytes, the associate director of domestic operations of USCIS has pledged that the agency will keep its promise made at the time of the increase: that in return for the higher fees, by 2010, applications for U.S. citizenship will be processed within 5 months, and petitions for green cards will be handled within four months.

This writer is somewhat skeptical about these optimistic predictions from the USCIS, but we will give the agency the benefit of the doubt and hope that these 750 extra officers will make the difference once the July 2007 surge in applications is two years behind us.

Following up on our blog "U.S. Supreme Court Deals Blow to Lawsuits Against Defective Products", the Court heard arguments on February 25 in Warner-Lambert v. Kent, to determine whether drug manufacturers should receive similar protection from lawsuits that the Court handed out to medical device makers earlier in February. Judge Breyer, normally one of the Court's most liberal justices, gave a strong indication that the Court is heading in the direction of protecting drug makers when he stated: "Who should make the decisions that will determine whether a drug is on balance, going to save people or, on balance, going to hurt people?... An expert agency, [The Food and Drug Administration] on the one hand or 12 people pulled randomly for a jury role who see before them only the people whom the drug hurt and don't see those who need the drug to cure them."

Seemingly forgetting about the thousands of injured victims of Vioxx, for example, who used a dangerous drug which had been approved by the F.D.A. and nevertheless suffered numerous deaths, heart attacks, and other complications, and without question needed the courts to redress their grievances, it appears that the Supreme Court is now ready to bar lawsuits against drug makers.

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Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that private lawsuits against medical device manufacturers are not permitted when the device in question complies with federal requirements. Essentially, the Court's decision in Riegel v. Medtronic is another example of the U.S. Supreme Court's attack on consumer rights, and will have far reaching negative effects for those who are seriously injured by dangerous and defective products . Charles Riegel received a balloon catheter manufactured by Medtronic which ruptured due to over inflation. He developed a heart block and was forced to undergo emergency surgery to save his life.

The Riegels brought a claim in federal court in New York, which was dismissed by the court, and upheld by the U.S. Circuit Court as being preempted by the Medical Devices Amendments (MDA). The MDA precludes lawsuits against manufacturers where the device in question complied with federal requirements. The problem with the Court's decision, as noted by Justice Ginsberg in her dissenting opinion, is what if evidence of the product's defect becomes known after the product has received premarket approval?

The Court stated in no uncertain terms its belief that juries are not capable of evaluating the risks associated with dangerous devices, with such language by Judge Scalia as the following: "The Dalkon Shield failure and its aftermath demonstrated the inability of the common law tort system to manage the risks associated with dangerous devices." And this quote from the opinion is even more frightening for those who believe in our civil justice system as a means to hold manufacturers of defective products accountable: "A jury on the other hand, sees only the cost of a more dangerous design, and is not concerned with its benefits; the patients who reaped those benefits are not represented in court."

The Riegel decision should send a chill down the spine of citizens in this country who believe that the civil justice system is vital in the effort to require manufacturers to ensure that their products are safe for the public before they are placed on the open market.