The title to this post is no joke. I found this on the Motley Fool website. Taser International has issued the following statement: "TASER International, Inc. ... announced today that ... a standard electrical discharge from a TASER brand device does not induce ventricular fibrillation, and that cocaine intoxication increases the safety margin even further." Maybe Taser's PR department...
There's a major problem in the agricultural fields of Florida. Yet, it goes practically unnoticed because those affected are migrant farmworkers who often don't speak much English. They pick our strawberries and tomatoes. They provide back breaking labor for sub standard wages. They often live in ramshackle trailers we wouldn't consider appropriate for farm animals. Most tragically, their...
Drug maker Wyeth is expected to announce as early as today that a revised legal settlement, covering the most common damage claims for the diet drugs it once sold, has won final judicial approval. About 5.8 million people took Wyeth's drugs Redux or Pondimin before they were removed from the market in 1997. The drugs constituted the fenfluramine portion of the once popular fen-phen diet...
There's an interesting article published in Advertising Ageabout how Bausch & Lomb botched the crisis surrounding its $500 million contact lens solution products market. In spite of a public relations blitz in which the company took out full page advertisements in 12 major daily newspapers, Bausch & Lomb was slow to react to the public health problems surrounding its products. Because of their...
Citing a growing number of deaths related to liver failure, the FDA has called for a stronger warning label for the antibiotic drug KetekThe FDA has received reports of 12 cases of acute liver failure, including the four deaths, in patients treated with Ketek, according to a copy of an FDA memo. FDA safety evaluators also uncovered 23 other cases where patients suffered serious liver injuries...
While physicians say they're rare, Fosamax users can be susceptible to "dead jaw" disease or commonly known as jaw rot. Fosamax, an osteoporosis drug belonging to the bisphosphonate family, can lead to "dead jaw" syndrome -- a painful condition that causes ulcers, tooth loss and exposed bone. But while cancer patients appear more at risk, Dr. Bruce Pihlstrom of the National Institutes of Health...
As part of the CDC's investigation of Bausch & Lomb's eye contact solution ReNu with MoistureLoc, a University of Pittsburgh Medical Center doctor was able to grow the fusarium keratitis fungus from the contact lens solution. Dr. Deepinder Dhaliwal, the Director of Refractive Surgery at UPMC found the dangerous fungus within the contact lens solution and gave her results to the CDC.
US Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley (R-IA) has called on the maker of Ketek, Sanofi-Aventis, to produce its investigator as part of a probe of the company's handling of the antibiotic. The letter released last night by Mr. Grassley, an Iowa Republican, is the second one he has sent to the FDA about the drug, which is made by Sanofi-Aventis SA. He told the agency he wants to...
The FDA said yesterday that ReNu maker Bausch & Lomb failed to promptly report 35 cases of the fusarium keratitis infection. The failure to inform the FDA within a 30 day time period is part of a larger list of 20 violations the FDA listed after inspecting the Greensville, SC plant.
I was quoted in today's Boston Globe as a result of Bausch & Lomb's decision to halt permanently the worldwide sales of its ReNu with MoistureLoc. As the paper stated, I think the decision confirms what we've suspected all along, namely, that the problem lies in the solution itself.