On December 4th, the Consumer Product Safety Commission recalled two toys:
1. The K2 Revo Kick kickboards/scooters with item code l10700100 — The front assembly of the kickboard/scooter can break and the handle can partially or fully detach, and this can cause a rider to lose control and/or loss of balance.
2. Manhattan Toy Quixel baby rattles — The colored arches can break creating a choking hazard to a small child.
On July 8, 2013 the first of four back-to-back transvaginal mesh trials begins in a federal courtroom in West Virginia. The results of these trials have implications for Tennessee women who have been injured by transvaginal mesh products inserted in them for pelvic organ prolapse and stress urinary incontinence.
What do trials in West Virginia have to do with lawsuits filed by woman in Tennessee? The trials are part of an MDL (multi-district litigation) proceeding that has collected various lawsuit filed against various transvaginal mesh manufacturers in federal courts around the country. The result in these cases will give the manufacturers and the lawyers for the woman who have been injured an opportunity to determine how jurors truly feel about these cases and what value, if any, they assign to the harm suffered by the female patient and her spouse. Indeed, these cases are known as "bellweather" cases – cases that are used to predict the likelihood of success in other similar cases against the mesh manufacturers.
The results of the West Virginia trials do not legally determine the outcome of any case other than the patient and the manufacturer involved in that particular trial. Rather, they simply provide all involved with more data about how a jury evaluates the liability and damage allegations in such cases. Thus, the outcome of these cases will have an impact on any later settlement of some 30,000 cases pending against various manufacturers of these products.
We are investigating a claim where a man had heart issues that resulted in severe heart damage and resultant disability. As part of that investigation is was learned that a prescription antibiotic drug that he had taken, azithromycin, is now the subject of a federal Food and Drug Admininstration (FDA) alert that the drug can can cause abnormal changes in the electrical activity of the heart that may lead to a potentially fatal irregular heart rhythm.
Azithromycin, sold under the names Zithromax or Zmax, is one of the world’s best selling antibiotics. It is used to treat a wide variety of infections. This drug was prescribed more than 40 million times in 2011.
The FDA’s Data Summary provides information about a recent study of the drug and its impact on the cardiovascular system.
A recent product recall is causing some families to investigate why their loved one died during dialysis treatment.
The Food and Drug Administration has ordered the recall of several products that are used during dialysis. The drugs have been linked to a condition known as metabolic alkalosis, which is a high serum bicarbonate level in the blood. Metabolic alkalosis can cause heart problems, cardiac arrest, stroke and death.
If your loved one died during or immediately after dialysis, it is important that you call a dialysis-death attorney as soon has possible. Tennessee law has a very short deadline for bringing this type of case, and unless you act promptly whatever rights you may have will be lost.
Those who have contracted fungal meningitis as a result of an epidural steroid injunction in Tennessee must file a lawsuit against the responsible parties within one year of the time they knew or reasonably should have known that they were injured by the contaminated steroid. ,
Because the "knew or reasonably should have known" language leaves room for interpretation, those harmed by the drug should work on the assumption that the one year deadline began to run on the date the injection that caused the infection unless a fungal meningitis lawyer familiar with all of the facts advises to the contrary.
This one-year deadline includes out-of-state residents who contracted the disease after receiving injections here, although different rules may apply depending on other facts. No state imposes a deadline shorter than Tennessee’s one-year deadline, and therefore this is a conservation assumption to use until a lawyer familiar with all of the facts can tell you if a different deadline applies to you.
Predictably, a fungal meningitis class action lawsuit has been filed against New England Compounding Center. The lawsuit seeks a class of people from Minnesota – not people from other states.
I will not be particularly surprised to see such a lawsuit in Tennessee, but I predict it will not be certified as a class action. You see, the simple filing of a class action lawsuit has little meaning. A class action lawsuit takes on meaning only if a judge agrees that class action certification is appropriate.
To certify a class action under Tennessee law, a judge must determine that "(1) the class is so numerous that joinder of all members is impracticable; (2) there are questions of law or fact common to the class; (3) the claims or defenses of the representative parties are typical of the claims or defenses of the class; and (4) the representative parties will fairly and adequately protect the interest of the class." This is a very hard burden to meet in personal injury and wrongful death cases. In fact, I don’t know of single class action involving personal injury and wrongful death claims that has ever been certified by a state court in Tennessee. (I am not saying it has never happened, but I certainly do not remember ever hearing about one in the last 30 years.)
As news about the fungal meningitis outbreak continues to dribble out, some might assume that we know what we need to know to evaluate commence and evaluate lawsuits against those responsible for causing the break.
We do not.
The fact of the matter is there is still much to be known about the fungal meningitis nightmare before these cases can be fully evaluated. Why? Because facts essential to understanding the liability issues in this case are in possession of people and corporations who have not yet been forced to share that information. Sure, various governmental agencies have got some information from these folks, and some of that information has found its way to the press, but there is lots of information yet to be fully brought to the public eye or confirmed.
The fungal meningitis outbreak is bringing the work of compounding pharmacies into the public eye, and many people do not like what they see.
Compounding pharmacies prepare medications that that are not readily available from a true drug manufacturer. The number of such facilities have exploded in the last decade and now some 2000 of these pharmacies exist. Most of them produce a relatively small number of products, but some of them, like the New England Compounding Center (NECC) that compounded the steroid used for epidural injections that gave risk to the outbreak, are quite large.
The Wall Street Journal has an article in today’s paper about how some doctors are thinking the use of such pharmacies.
Recent changes to Tennessee law substantially limit the liability of those who sell dangerous or defective products.
The manufacturer of the product is the one that is primarily responsible if a dangerous or defective product kills or injures a person. The seller of the product is only responsible for the product if
Here is the latest on the fungal meningitis outbreak first discovered in Nashville and now spreading to other states:
There are still many unanswered questions about this entire tragedy and the answers to some of those questions will not be known for months and months.
Tennessee Injury Law Center