Vested Interest - News and Notes - September 2005 Issue

FDA Told of Viagra-Blindness Link Months Ago

More than 13 months before a scientific journal reported that Viagra had been linked to a rare form of blindness in some men, a FDA safety officer made the same observation from monitoring adverse event reports and told her supervisors that doctors and patients should be warned of the findings. Her recommendation was well received, she told congressional investigators, but nothing happened. The FDA issued no public notice or proposed changes to the Viagra label. (ATLA Law News Digest – July 7, 2005)

Report of Ritalin Risk Prompts Study

Federal health officials said they were looking into a suggestion by a small Texas study that Ritalin and other stimulant drugs given to children might increase their risk of cancer later in life. A team of experts from the FDA, the National Institutes of Health and the EPA went to Texas and examined the methods used by researchers, who found damage to the chromosomes of 12 children who took Ritalin for three months. (ATLA Law News Digest – July 7, 2005)

Rare Cancer Linked to Asbestos

A recent study has found where you live increases your risk of cancer from asbestos. The study of naturally occurring asbestos by a team from the University of California-Davis Department of Public Health Sciences examined every case of mesothelioma in California for a 10-year period, nearly 3,000 in all, and tracked where patients lived. The study found that people who lived closer to an asbestos source had a greater chance of having mesothelioma, and the chance decreased steadily as the distance increased, about 6.3 percent for every 6.2 miles. (ATLA Law News Digest – July 14, 2005)

Class Action Websites Untested

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals recently ruled that a Los Angeles plaintiffs firm was not required to provide Paxil maker GlaxoSmithKline with answers to questionnaires that consumers completed on the law firms’ website about their use of the antidepressant. The court found that even though the website stated that answering the questionnaire would not create an attorney-client relationship, California law required the information remain privileged and out the drug makers reach. (ATLA Law News Digest – July 14, 2005)

Hands-Free Devices Don’t Aid Road Safety

A study of Australian drivers found that those using cellphones were four times as likely to be involved in a serious crash regardless of whether they used hands-free devices like earpieces or speaker phones that have been perceived as making talking while driving safer. The study, appearing in The British Medical Journal, is the first of its kind to use actual crash data and cellphone records to show a link between talking on the phone and being seriously injured in an accident. It is also the first to conclude definitively outside of a laboratory setting that holding a phone to the ear or talking through a hands-free device posed the same risk. (ATLA Law News Digest – July 14, 2005)

Baxter Recalls Drug Pumps

Baxter International stopped shipping intravenous pumps used in hospitals because of a malfunction that caused a small number of pumps to stop delivering medication to patients. The FDA said a shutdown of the pumps could be a "life-threatening failure" and said there may have been six injuries and three deaths associated with Baxter’s Colleague Volumetric Infusion Pumps. Baxter is offering to repair the recalled pumps, estimated to cost Baxter about $65 million, or 10 cents a share. More than 250,000 of the pumps are in use worldwide, including about 206,000 in the U.S. (Chicago Tribune – July 22, 2005)

Cleaning up After Dry Cleaners

A neighborhood in Harris County, Texas is experiencing the fallout from dry cleaners’ use of the solvent perchloroethylene, a possible carcinogen. Dry cleaners knew nothing about the risks of perchloroethylene, known as perc, when it came into common use in the 1950s. In those days, chemical manufacturers even suggested that old perc or perc waste products could be tossed on dirt piles behind shops. (ATLA Law News Digest – July 28, 2005)

Brain Cancer Linked to Nerve Agent

A study has found an increase in brain cancer deaths among Gulf War veterans who might have been exposed to the nerve agent sarin by the destruction of Iraqi weapons in 1991. About 100,000 of the 350,000 Army soldiers in the Persian Gulf could have been exposed to sarin after soldiers blew up two large ammunition caches, according to a study commissioned by the military and performed by the Institute of Medicine. (ATLA Law News Digest – July 28, 2005)

Cardiac Patients Wait Longer at Night

A new study finds that heart attack suffers who go to hospitals on nights and weekends wait longer for an artery-clearing angioplasty than patients during regular hours, increasing their risk of dying. After-hours patients wait an average one hour and 56 minutes for what is considered to be the best treatment for heart attacks in most cases, compared with one hour and 35 minutes for patients during regular business hours. Current guidelines recommend patients wait no longer than one hour and 30 minutes from the time they enter the emergency room. Four out of 10 patients waited more than two hours for a balloon angioplasty. Delays raised the risk that patients would die by about 7 percent. (AP – August 17, 2005)

Federal Trials Decline for Injury Lawsuits

A report issued by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics shows that the number of tort cases resolved in U.S. district courts fell 79 percent between 1985 and 2003. In 1985, 3,600 tort trials were decided by a judge or jury in U.S. district courts. By 2003, that number had dropped to less than 800. The number of tort cases decided by a judge or jury as a percentage of all tort cases fell from 10 percent to 2 percent during the same time period. In the fiscal years of 2002-03, the U.S. district court system handled 98,786 tort cases of personal injury loss or damage due to the negligent or intentionally harmful acts. Only 1,647, or two percent, of these tort cases were resolved through bench and jury trials. The data in the report are representative of those cases. (Bureau of Justice Statistics press release - August 17, 2005)