TITLE: A Train Took His Legs. KCS Railway Put the Blame on Him.
https://www.propublica.org/article/trains-railroad-kcs-kansas-city-southern-injuries-lawsuit
EXCERPT: Railroad companies have a long history of hiding injuries, as ProPublica recently reported. But in some catastrophes like [45-year-old brakeman Chris] Cole’s, in which the injuries are so grievous they can’t be denied, ProPublica found that companies moved almost immediately to cover up their culpability.
Some attempts to deny the causes of accidents obscured safety hazards, such as faulty latches, which could have put more workers at risk, ProPublica found. Others took actions that made worker injuries far worse.
In 2014, after two BNSF workers in Minneapolis breathed in a cloud of highly toxic chemicals that may have vented from passing rail cars, managers claimed that the men were exposed to a far less dangerous substance. One of the workers, Scott Kowalewski, suffered severe, permanent neurological damage. The other later died by suicide, a tragedy that was impossible to incontrovertibly link to the accident.
When Kowalewski sued, BNSF claimed that he didn’t say he was exposed to the more toxic material until three-and-a-half years after the incident and maintained throughout the case that his deteriorating health had nothing to do with the exposure. But a jury sided with Kowalewski in 2018 and awarded him $15.3 million. And a judge concluded that the railroad’s “misrepresentation prevented Kowalewski from receiving appropriate medical treatment that might have remediated his injury.” The judge ordered BNSF to pay an additional $5.8 million penalty for its misconduct, writing that the extent of it was “vast, and spans from the outset of its initial sham investigation.”
Cole’s case wasn’t even the first involving a railroad sign. Bradley Anderson was riding on the side ladder of a rail car in 2019 when he struck his head on a milepost sign that was too close to the tracks. He was diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury. Officials from his company, BNSF, pulled the sign out of the ground before its position was adequately documented.
This July, the federal judge on Anderson’s case excoriated the company. “Despite receiving multiple court admonitions for destroying and concealing evidence, BNSF engaged in the same type of misconduct here,” U.S. District Judge Rebecca Goodgame Ebinger wrote in an order, declaring that the company was responsible for Anderson’s injury, and approved sanctions for the damage caused by the “bad faith” removal of the sign. The case eventually settled.
She also said she was forwarding the case to the Iowa Supreme Court Attorney Disciplinary Board and the Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission, “in the event either body should see fit to initiate an investigation into an apparent abuse of legal procedure.”
Neither of those bodies would disclose to ProPublica whether they had received the judge’s referral or whether they planned to act on the information.
In civil litigation, it falls on workers’ attorneys to prove companies tampered with evidence. If a judge agrees, they can sanction the companies for millions of dollars or, in an extreme case, even enter a default judgment for the worker. (The judges in Kowalewski’s and Anderson’s cases entered such default judgments against BNSF.) But outside of those repercussions, there is little else in terms of punishment for companies that repeat the behavior. “It comes out in an individual case,” said Daniel Gourash, editor of the American Bar Association book “Spoliation of Evidence.” “The sanction that would be given would not be because of a habitual spoliation activity or conduct or behavior.”
TITLE: Deep Flaws in FDA Oversight of Medical Devices, and Patient Harm, Exposed in Lawsuits and Records
https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/medical-device-malfunction-fda-oversight-patient-harm/
EXCERPT: Living with diabetes, Carlton “PeeWee” Gautney Jr. relied on a digital device about the size of a deck of playing cards to pump insulin into his bloodstream.
The pump, manufactured by device maker Medtronic, connected plastic tubing to an insulin reservoir, which Gautney set to release doses of the vital hormone over the course of the day. Gautney, a motorcycle enthusiast, worked as a dispatcher with the police department in Opp, Alabama.
The 59-year-old died suddenly on May 17, 2020, because — his family believes — the pump malfunctioned and delivered a fatal overdose of insulin.
“There’s a big hole left where he was,” said Gautney’s daughter, Carla Wiggins, who is suing the manufacturer. “A big part of me is missing.”
The wrongful-death lawsuit alleges the pump was “defective and unreasonably dangerous.” Medtronic has denied the pump caused Gautney’s death and filed a court motion for summary judgment, which is pending.
The pump Gautney depended on was among more than 400,000 Medtronic devices recalled, starting in November 2019, after the company said in a recall notice that damage to a retainer ring on the pump could “lead to an over or under delivery of insulin,” which could “be life threatening or may result in death.”
As the recall played out, federal regulators discovered that Medtronic had delayed acting — and warning patients of possible hazards with the pumps — despite amassing tens of thousands of complaints about the rings, government records show.
Over the past year, KFF Health News has investigated medical device malfunctions including:
· Artificial knees manufactured by a Gainesville, Florida, company that remained on the market for more than 15 years despite packaging issues that the company said could have caused more than 140,000 of the implants to wear out prematurely.
· Metal hip implants that snapped in two inside patients who said in lawsuits that they required urgent surgery.
· Last-resort heart pumps that FDA records state may have caused or contributed to thousands of patient deaths.
· And even a dental device, used on patients without FDA review, that lawsuits alleged has caused catastrophic harm to teeth and jawbones. CBS News co-reported and aired TV stories about the hip and dental devices.
The investigation has found that most medical devices, including many implants, are now cleared for sale by the FDA without tests for safety or effectiveness. Instead, manufacturers must simply show they have “substantial equivalence” to a product already in the marketplace — an approval process some experts view as vastly overused and fraught with risks.
“Patients believe they are getting an implant that’s been proven safe,” said Joshua Sharlin, a former FDA official who now is a consultant and expert witness in drug and medical device regulation. “No, it hasn’t,” Sharlin said.
And once those devices reach the marketplace, the FDA struggles to track malfunctions, including deaths and injuries — while injured patients face legal barriers trying to hold manufacturers accountable for product defects.
TITLE: Tesla Lied To Customers, Blaming Them For Shoddy Parts The Company Knew Were Defective
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/12/21/tesla-lied-to-customers-blaming-them-for-shoddy-parts-the-company-knew-were-defective/
EXCERPT: Back in July, Reuters released a bombshell report showing that not only has Tesla aggressively lied about its EV ranges for the better part of the last decade, it created teams whose entire purpose was to lie to customers about it when they called up to complain. The story lasted all of two days in the news cycle before it was supplanted by clickbait stories about a billionaire fist fight that never actually happened.
Now Reuters is back again, with another major story showcasing how for much of that same decade, Tesla routinely blamed customers for the failure of substandard parts the company knew to be defective. The outlet reviewed thousands of Tesla documents and found a pattern where customers would complain about dangerously broken and low-quality parts, only to be repeatedly gaslit by the company:
“Wheels falling off cars at speed. Suspensions collapsing on brand-new vehicles. Axles breaking under acceleration. Tens of thousands of customers told Tesla about a host of part failures on low-mileage cars. The automaker sought to blame drivers for vehicle ‘abuse,’ but Tesla documents show it had tracked the chronic ‘flaws’ and ‘failures’ for years.”
The records show a repeated pattern across tens of thousands of customers where parts would fail, then the customer would be accused of “abusing” their vehicle. They also show that Tesla meticulously tracked part failures, knew many parts were defective, and routinely not only lied to regulators about it, but charged customers to repair parts they knew had high failure rates and were systemically prone to failure:
“Yet the company has denied some of the suspension and steering problems in statements to U.S. regulators and the public– and, according to Tesla records, sought to shift some of the resulting repair costs to customers.”
This is obviously a very different narrative than the one Musk presented last month at that unhinged New York Times DealBook event:
“We make the best cars. Whether you hate me, like me or are indifferent, do you want the best car, or do you not want the best car?”
They are, as it turns out, not the best cars.
And this is before you even touch on the growing pile of corpses caused by the company’s half-cooked and repeatedly misrepresented “full self driving” technology, which last week resulted in the recall of nearly every vehicle that has it. That problem was, as reports have documented in detail, thanks in part to non-engineer Musk over-ruling his actual engineers when it comes to only using cameras.
This comes as a new study shows that Tesla vehicles have the highest accident rate of any brand on the road. As usual, U.S. regulators have generally been asleep or lethargic during most of this, worried that enforcing basic public safety standards would somehow be stifling “innovation.”