Conflicts of Interest Category Archives — Page 2 of 46 — DC Medical Malpractice & Patient Safety Blog Published by Washington, D.C. Personal Injury Lawyers

June 3, 2022

Baby formula mess shows big profits, a filthy plant, and bungled oversight

The giant drug maker Abbott and the federal Food and Drug Administration both should hang their heads in shame as more information becomes public as to how they left millions of vulnerable infants hungry and put kids’ health at risk by wrongs involving the manufacture and distribution of a vital foodstuff — baby formula.

Millions of parents have gone into meltdown because of a nationwide shortage of the needed nutrient. It was sparked by the shutdown of Abbott’s formula-producing plant in Michigan, as well as the company’s product recall after babies got sick and died from infections involving Cronobacter sakazakii bacteria.

While Abbott has emphasized that experts have not conclusively linked the bacteria to its formula and the firm has played up its cooperation in a product recall, Robert Califf, the FDA’s chief and a doctor, ripped the company. He told a U.S. House subcommittee that agency inspectors found “egregiously unsanitary” conditions at the drug maker’s plant, the New York Times reported, quoting him, thusly:

June 1, 2022

For UCLA and Southern Baptists, sexual abuse scandals exact big toll

by Patrick A. Malone

The University of California has agreed to pay yet more to hundreds of women patients who have credibly accused a UCLA gynecologist of sexual wrongdoing, with the now $700 million in approved settlements setting what is described as a national record for the largest such payouts involving a public university.

The UC system, one of the nation’s largest and highest ranked in academic achievement, says it must issue medical facility bonds to cover the staggering costs of claims against Dr. James Heaps and his sexual misconduct between 1983 and 2018 because the institution has exhausted its insurance coverage, the Los Angeles Times reported. University officials called the actions of the onetime health service and specialty doctor practicing at its renowned hospital “reprehensible and contrary to our values.”

The latest, increased UCLA payout of $375 million (for 300-plus cases) comes atop previous settlements of $244 million (for 200 cases), $73 million (for 5,000 claims), and $2.5 million (a single sexual assault incident), the newspaper reported.

May 29, 2022

An advanced democracy can’t shrug at mass deaths, especially kid killings

by Patrick A. Malone

Experts fear the country is veering dangerously into a widespread acceptance of mass death as just a regular part of life — not only by moving on with little more than faint acknowledgement of more than 1 million coronavirus pandemic fatalities but also with a tragic resignation about fatal shootings at schools, groceries, movie theaters, and other public places.

It has been chilling to watch the “new normal” of the public reactions to a racist shooting that killed 10 in a Buffalo, N.Y., grocery, and the slaughter of 19 children and two adults at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas with destructive disinformation spreading, public officials fatally bungling, and political partisanship calcifying apace.

Most Americans recognized that the coronavirus was the worst health threat to the global community in a century. Most of us listened to experienced, evidence-based experts and followed their recommendations to quell the disease. But Republicans, with their White House running a shambolic, counter factual pandemic response, quickly politicized the efforts to battle the disease, experts say, and that helped bring about hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths.

May 25, 2022

Social media blamed for fueling opioid crisis for the young

by Patrick A. Malone

The social media sites that young folks so adore also have turned into virtual illicit drug bazaars, helping to explain the exploding problems with the powerful synthetic painkiller fentanyl and why opioids and overdoses of them have become a leading killer of Americans ages 18 to 45.

During the coronavirus pandemic, especially, and continuing onward, Snapchat, TikTok, and other social media apps, including those that allow users to swap encrypted or disappearing messages, have helped to fuel a burgeoning market in Percocet, Xanax, and other prescription pills, the New York Times has reported. Authorities have warned that those drugs by themselves would be hugely problematic but criminal dealers also have taken to tainting their wares with fentanyl — an easily manufactured opioid that requires only minute doses to provide a big kick, fast addiction, and too easy death. As the newspaper reported:

“Overdoses are now the leading cause of preventable death among people ages 18 to 45, ahead of suicide, traffic accidents, and gun violence, according to federal data. Although experimental drug use by teenagers in the United States has been dropping since 2010, their deaths from fentanyl have skyrocketed, to 884 in 2021, from 253 in 2019, according to a recent study in the journal JAMA. Rates of illicit prescription pill use are now highest among people ages 18 to 25, according to federal data.

May 17, 2022

Opioid death toll shatters records as judge weighs pharmacy chain penalties

by Patrick A. Malone

Even as the opioid abuse and drug overdose crisis worsens and breaks annual records for its resulting death toll, the reckoning for parties blamed for fostering the national nightmare is grinding forward.

A federal judge in Cleveland has begun hearing arguments whether three giant pharmacy chains should be fined billions of dollars after a jury in November found them culpable for damages they caused in two Ohio counties in the opioid mess.

And new disclosures are emerging regarding bankrupt drug maker Mallinckrodt, which federal officials have described as the “the kingpin within the drug cartel” of legitimate companies driving the opioid epidemic.

May 13, 2022

As pediatricians seek to end race bias in care, a caution on parent burnout

by Patrick A. Malone

While the nation’s pediatricians have announced an important, high-minded goal of eliminating racial bias in the medical treatment of children, working parents and other full-time caregivers for kids need a different kind of help, too, for a growing, serious problem — burnout.

These seemingly different issues share a common discovery point, rooted in challenges made large by the coronavirus pandemic and the recent unrest over social injustices experienced by communities of color, news media reports say.

Medical practitioners of various kinds, including kids’ specialists, have been forced to reexamine their consciences and beliefs even before but especially after the 2020 death in police custody of George Floyd, the AP reported. For pediatricians and their important practice group, this led to a medical reckoning, valuable to all patients but especially those of color:

April 27, 2022

Cautions issued over prenatal genetic tests in IVF and for rare diseases

by Patrick A. Malone

Expectant parents, doctors, and regulators need to reconsider the rising use of gee-whiz genetic testing as doubts emerge about popular blood screenings to detect rare prenatal disorders and a costly test relied on by couples undergoing in-vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment.

This is what the New York Times reported about what researchers have found about preimplantation genetic testing for aneuploidy, or PGT-A. It is an increasingly common screening in IVF and has led potential parents to discard embryos as unfeasible or unacceptable due to abnormalities to carry to term:

“PGT-A … has, over the last two decades, become a standard add-on to already pricey IVF procedures. But the test, which can cost anywhere from $4,000 to $10,000, has become controversial over the years as studies have cast doubt on whether it increases birthrates from IVF at all. A growing number of scientists have questioned the widespread use of the test, which leads to tens of thousands of discarded embryos per year and causes many women to believe they may not be able to carry biological children. A new study published last week details 50 patients who underwent transfers of abnormal embryos at the Center for Human Reproduction in New York City … The study reported eight births after 57 transfer cycles of embryos with abnormal genetic testing results since 2015. Seven of the babies were born healthy. The average age of the women in the study was 41 years old.

April 26, 2022

Specialized cancer hospitals hike drug costs by up to 630%, study finds

by Patrick A. Malone

While patients often seek treatment at big, fancy hospitals, in part because they are designated as National Cancer Institute centers, these institutions provide a sticker-shock surprise for those receiving their specialized care: They jack up the already sky-high cost of prescription cancer drugs with markups going up from 120% to 630% above what they pay for the medications.

Those are the findings of researchers at the Harvard and Yale medical schools and elsewhere as reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association’s Internal Medicine publication. As they noted with expert restraint:

“The findings of this study suggest that, to reduce the financial burden of cancer treatment for patients, institution of public policies to discourage or prevent excessive hospital price markups on … chemotherapeutics may be beneficial.”

April 25, 2022

U.S. finding more and more ways to undercut efforts to quell pandemic

by Patrick A. Malone

Hundreds of Americans keep dying each day due to the coronavirus. Tens of thousands of people across the country are reporting they are newly infected with the disease, even as at-home testing lowers this count. Thousands of patients still are hospitalized due to the virus that has killed at least 1 million in this country. But even as worrisome measures of the pandemic rise anew, important ways to battle the deadliest infectious disease outbreak in a century are dwindling.

Health officials are grappling with a federal judge’s ruling, upending nationwide what has been a minimally inconvenient step to quell the pandemic — a requirement for passengers to cover their faces while traveling on public transportation.

The judge — yes, an appointee from the last administration who was deemed by the Bar to be not qualified for her lifetime post — staked out a dubious legal view that federal officials overstepped their authority with the mask order. U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, sitting in Tampa, Fla., asserted among other things in her ruling that she thinks Congress limited the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to be involved only in “inspection, fumigation, disinfection, sanitation, destruction, or pest extermination.”

April 20, 2022

Opioid crisis takes a new scary turn: Mass casualties at once

by Patrick A. Malone

The opioid abuse and drug overdose crisis has veered into a frightening new phase in which the rise of the easy-to-make, exceedingly powerful synthetic painkiller fentanyl is causing multiple, interconnected deaths at one time.

The nation’s capital already has experienced this grim situation, which only shows signs of worsening, the Washington Post reported on April 12:

“Ten people in two neighborhoods in Northeast Washington have now died from a lethal batch of fentanyl, police said .. the second mass-casualty incident involving the deadly opioid in the District this year. Police said at least 17 people overdosed on cocaine laced with fentanyl in Trinidad and Ivy City from [April 9-11] and seven of them survived. In January, nine people died after taking a similar concoction in a neighborhood near Nationals Park. Authorities arrested two people in that case and said they do not believe the most recent incidents are connected to the earlier overdoses.”