Research Studies Category Archives — Page 2 of 58 — DC Medical Malpractice & Patient Safety Blog Published by Washington, D.C. Personal Injury Lawyers

October 24, 2021

U.S. has three approved boosters and is prepped to vaccinate kids

Don’t doubt the central role that vaccines are playing in the battle against the coronavirus pandemic.

Federal officials — even as the Delta-variant surge is easing — have dominated the news by approving yet more boosters for those who have gotten the Moderna or Johnson & Johnson shots and announcing preparations to vaccinate kids ages 5 to 12.

Experts now have endorsed boosters for the millions who have gotten Pfizer, Moderna, and J&J shots. They also approved proposals to mix and match vaccines, an approach especially advised two months after those 18 and older receive the one-shot J&J product.

October 23, 2021

Cut the salt in prepared and packaged food, U.S. urges makers and sellers

by Patrick A. Malone

Americans of all ages adore fast food and prepared meals, but one of the lures is these tasty items are loaded with salt. Now federal regulators have proposed new guidelines that they say could save millions of lives by reducing the salt content of commercially prepared and packaged foods.

The Food and Drug Administration’s standards, directed at food that flies out of restaurants, as well as from grocery freezers and shelves, seeks to get manufacturers, restaurants, and food services to help people cut their sodium intake by 12% in the next 2.5 years.

That may seem like a slight amount, but it could have significant effects, the New York Times reported:

October 20, 2021

FDA gives Big Tobacco a big win — approval for e-cigarette for vaping

by Patrick A. Malone

The federal Food and Drug Administration has infuriated health and anti-smoking advocates by handing Big Tobacco a major first — the agency’s seal of approval for an e-cigarette as a way for consumers to reduce or stop harmful use of burning tobacco cigarettes.

The decision allowing RJ Reynold’s Vuse product (shown, left) to stay on public markets is the latest in a series of disastrous actions by the agency, putting a smoking alternative for adults ahead of the health and safety of young people, critics said. They repeated their contention that with bungled oversight on alternative delivery devices and the vaping fad, the FDA has opened the way for a new generation to get addicted to toxic nicotine and lethal tobacco items.

Erika Sward, national assistant vice president for advocacy at the American Lung Association, told the New York Times this of the FDA ruling allowing an e-cigarette delivering high levels of nicotine:

October 19, 2021

Daily low-dose aspirin? Rethink its risks vs. benefits, experts advise

by Patrick A. Malone

Aspirin may not be the easy, cheap, daily wonder drug that doctors once thought it might be: New research has led medical experts to rethink and caution against the low-dose regimen followed by tens of millions of patients in hopes of preventing heart and colon conditions.

Those popping aspirin as a safeguard should talk to their doctors, pronto, about continuing to do so — and they should not suddenly quit, on their own. For the middle-aged and mostly healthy, who once might have been routinely advised to do so, doctors should refrain from recommending they take regular low doses, an elite expert advisory panel says.

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF), independent and respect advisors on medical tests and protective procedures, says that evidence has built that aspirin’s risks of causing problematic internal bleeding (in the brain and gastric tract) exceeds its benefits in thinning the blood and reducing heart and colon conditions. As the New York Times reported:

October 17, 2021

As Delta surge eases, what’s next with this pandemic?

by Patrick A. Malone

As the summer’s deadly Delta variant surge slowly seems to be receding, questions are rising anew as to what further harms the coronavirus pandemic may inflict on a nation that already has suffered greatly.

The infection still is creating major problems in Alaska, as well as parts of the West and Upper Midwest, notably Minnesota. There, hospitals and health care systems are struggling to care for not only their regular populations of patients but also big numbers of unvaccinated patients requiring intensive treatment for Covid-19.

An unacceptable 1,700 Americans still are dying on average each day from the virus, even as medical scientists and doctors now can muster a growing arsenal to prevent and battle the illness — with free, widely available vaccinations, new monoclonal antibody therapies, and public health measures like face covering, distancing, testing, and quarantines.

October 15, 2021

Aching backs lead to dubious surgeries and billion$ in revenue$

by Patrick A. Malone

As the nation rapidly grays, not only are middle-aged and older patients undergoing increasing numbers of knee, hip, ankle, and shoulder surgeries, back operations also have spiked — and a significant number of these procedures may be unwarranted and harmful.

Spinal surgery is a booming business for orthopedic surgeons and hospitals, with Wall Street analysts forecasting, according to one report, that the “sales of spinal surgery implants, instruments, pharmaceuticals and other novel treatments for chronic and disabling back pain will … rise from $10 billion in 2020 to $14 billion -$ 16 billion by 2030.”

While rising numbers of patients, starting around age 42, complain of back pain and many eventually seek surgical relief, skepticism and concern may be deserved for the common, costly, and lucrative spinal fusion surgery, Modern Healthcare, an industry trade publication reported in its Oct. 5 edition.

September 17, 2021

Facts and truth-telling matter — in dramas, governance, health, and the law

by Patrick A. Malone

It’s a small occupational hazard that accompanies membership in the Bar — the ribbing that all lawyers take at social functions with those groan-inducing lawyer jokes.

While the good-natured jests typically merit a chuckle and a pass, it’s worth noting, two decades after the 9/11 tragedy and with all the deeply divisive events that have occurred since, that there are clear indicators that the legal profession deserves more credit than jibes. Lawyers are striving at least to preserve their constitutional responsibilities as a pillar of truth-telling in the contentious world. Others? Maybe less so. And the public should not be confused about this.

When viewers see the splashy Netflix documentary Worth, for example, they should take judicial notice that it creates a fictionalized account about trial lawyers and the push to compensate victims of the Sept. 11 catastrophe, argues the Center for Justice and Democracy at New York Law School.

September 15, 2021

FDA snuffs out cloud of e-cigarette and vaping products but delays big ruling

by Patrick A. Malone

The federal Food and Drug Administration punted on a scheduled showdown over e-cigarettes, delaying decisions on whether to allow Juul and other market-dominating firms to keep selling trendy “smokeless” devices while also banning millions of vaping products from other, mostly smaller manufacturers.

The agency argued with a defensive and defiant tone that it had acted on 6.5 million filings and 93% of the requests for approval to market e-cigarette and vaping-related products, rejecting most (including millions of flawed applications from a single applicant).

But the FDA said it needed more time — how much it didn’t say — to weigh evidence from big e-cigarette makers who hold sway over 40% of the market. They claim their products’ benefits in helping adults stop smoking tobacco, especially killer cigarettes, outweighs the harms they cause to young people, likely addicting new generations to health-damaging nicotine and opening a gateway to tobacco and marijuana consumption.

September 14, 2021

Nursing homes recorded a horrific pandemic toll. But it may be even worse.

by Patrick A. Malone

In recent days, academic researchers and politicians have made distressing disclosures about the terrible toll the coronavirus pandemic took on the aged, injured, and sick in nursing homes and other long term care facilities with new data suggesting the disease infected more of the vulnerable and killed more of them than previously known.

Government officials, in the pandemic’s early days, may have failed to count 16,000 nursing home deaths due to the coronavirus, researchers at Harvard, UCLA, the University of Minnesota, and Massachusetts General Hospital reported in an online section of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Before federal reporting rules took effect in May 2020, officials also may have missed 68,000 more nursing home infections, the researchers found.

September 12, 2021

U.S. toughens steps to quell surging pandemic as cultish resistance cries foul

by Patrick A. Malone

To those unfamiliar with the history of world religions and disease, the formidable duo shown here are Hosogami (left) and Shapona (right). In two different societies of yore, in the 600s and 700s A.D. in Japan and in the 18^th and even into the 19^th century in Nigeria, the fervent built religious rites around these smallpox deities.

Worshippers hoped various behaviors would appease their lords of infection, with later experts coming to believe that the priests of Shapona (aka Sopona) also helped to spread the highly contagious and disfiguring illness by scratching villagers as part of extortion schemes. Science and vaccinations eventually eradicated smallpox globally, with infectious disease and public health experts historically mindful how fear, ignorance, and societal pressures can lead numbers of people to embrace counterfactual and cultish responses to scary illnesses.

Now, can President Biden and his administration — with a new and tougher program to get millions of unvaccinated Americans to finally get coronavirus shots — back down what increasingly has become a politically partisan and almost theological opposition to proven methods to quell a disease that has killed 660,000 Americans already and is taking 1,500 lives each day?