by admin on January 25, 2012
Members of the DePuy Hip Recall may be looking at some good news. Johnson & Johnson has reported that due to the DePuy Hip Recall and other litigation, along with certain acquisition difficulties, their earnings have dropped a staggering 89% for the fourth quarter of the fiscal year.
Their fourth quarter earnings only come to $218 million after assorted legal and other costs, dropping their stock to 8 cents per share. This comes after the company posted a $2.9 billion set of after-tax charges for a number of expenses — legal settlements, liability expenses for their products, and the costs of the planned acquisition of fellow pharma company Synthes.
To put the damage in perspective, at this time last year, the company was selling at 70 cents per share.
The DePuy Hip Recall was specifically named in the report as a particularly expensive and noteworthy litigation for the company.
If consumers harmed by pharmaceutical companies like DePuy and its parent Johnson & Johnson want their voices to be heard, litigation is often the only recourse. Seeing that their litigation has been a part of the company’s latest round of troubles should give the members of the DePuy Hip Replacement lawsuit a great deal of hope for the future of their efforts. Companies that are in tight straights tend to be more inclined to settle than those in better fiscal shape, so clearly this is the time to continue pressing claims against the irresponsibility of DePuy.
Just as a reminder, the ASR Hip Replacement device was rushed into production with very little testing because it was supposedly “very like” products already on the market. The early failure rate of these metal-on-metal devices began to cause problems in a large number of patients, including causing pain, severe tissue damage and tissue death, and heavy metal toxicity.
by admin on January 23, 2012
Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a field that is difficult to study. One of the major limitations to studying TBI is that there is no centralized database of knowledge that exists for physicians to reference. Each state healthcare system, and often, individual doctors and hospitals, take what approaches they believe work best, working through the darkness of a lack of common clarity. Centralizing information is a key to helping disseminate it, as efforts such as Wikipedia and JSTOR (an online archive of peer reviewed journals) have demonstrated.
Efforts are now being made to combat the lack of knowledge about traumatic brain injuries, such as common statistics, most frequent symptoms, recovery rates compared to various treatments, and so forth. One such effort is H.R. 2600, the National Pediatric Acquired Brain Injury Plan Act.
H.R. 2600 was proposed in the House of Representatives last year, and seeks to appropriate $2.9 million in order to create a best-practices database for doctors to reference.
In short and simple terms, the database will be a powerful reference tool that doctors can consult to see what treatments have worked the best for various cases of TBI in the past, allowing them to make more consistent judgment calls. This will allow for more effective scientific analysis and meta-analysis, potentially leading to further advances in effective treatments.
Our ability to deal with dangers such as TBI relies on doctors having current information. Up until recently, for example, sports players were often sent back onto the field after receiving concussions, frequently during the same game in which they had the initial injury. This happened for many years, despite evidence already existing that repeated brain injuries are more likely to result in severe, long term damage to the brain and quality of life. Creating a centralized best-practices database such as the one proposed by H.R. 2600 is a valuable first step in preventing this sort of mistake from happening again.
