Last summer on Missouri Highway 40, an Alabama trucker plowed into stopped traffic on Highway 40 in St. Louis County killing 3 people. He is now being held at the St. Louis County jail in Clayton, MO after being charged with three counts of involuntary manslaughter as a result of…
Results from a new study show that deaths associated with forklift accidents are rising. Data was collected over a 15-year period by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) under their Traumatic Occupational Fatality surveillance system. The study showed that forklifts, or powered industrial vehicles, were involved in…
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has reported that it has received 23 reports of adverse health effects in persons who have used the weight-loss product, Hydroxycut. Reported complications from using Hydroxycut include heart problems and a kind of muscle damage that could lead to kidney failure. One person suffering…
New reports show that even licensed truck drivers and bus drivers in Illinois may be unqualified to drive their respective vehicles because of inadequate testing in other states. Some of these unqualified drivers are threats to the public utilizing Illinois highways and can even lead to tragic trucking accidents and…
I recently came across a case where a Chicago jury returned a verdict of $3.4 million for the plaintiff who had been prescribed Fleet Phospho-Soda Buffered Saline Laxative for a colonoscopy procedure. The case centered on the physician who had prescribed Fleet Phospho-Soda, an over-the-counter oral laxative used to cleanse…
Trucking accidents in Illinois linked to unskilled truckers have spiraled upward in the last several years, which is in part a result of many unskilled truck drivers have actually receiving their trucking licenses fraudulently. In the last five years, the US government has uncovered licensing fraud in 24 states, including…
A long term study of older patients with Type 2 diabetes found that those who had experienced even one episode of hypoglycemia, or life threatening drops in blood sugar, were at a higher risk for developing dementia than diabetic patients who had not experienced such an episode. The findings to…
Recently my wife was called to serve as a juror in a Chicago-Cook County jury case. Although she was ultimately not called, it reminded me that we must never take this process for granted. The 7th amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives the right of trial by jury that no…
Recently, a local Chicago doctor working in a Veterans Affairs Hospital recognized signs of clostridium difficile, also known as C. difficile, a contagious and potentially deadly bacteria that is difficult to track. The illness kills an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 people annually with most of the cases occurring in health…
If the Chicago Cubs do win the 2009 World Series, it might have been predicted by a computer simulation which explores baseball strategies and their effect on the game’s outcome. In 1958 a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) developed a program to investigate whether the sacrifice bunt…