Gair, Gair, Conason, Rubinowitz, Bloom, Hershenhorn, Steigman & Mackauf is a New York Plaintiff's personal injury law firm specializing in automobile accidents, construction accidents, medical malpractice, products liability, police misconduct and all types of New York personal injury litigation.
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A 27 year old driver struck and killed an 83 year old pedestrian last Thursday night in Brooklyn, NYC.  Isaak Trakhtenberg was trying to cross busy Pennsylvania Ave between Two Pines and Shroeders. He had already made it to the middle of the avenue and was standing on a concrete median that divides the southbound and the northbound lanes.  He was hit by the car of the young driver as he stepped in the southbound lane. The driver stayed at the scene and wasn’t charged. The pedestrian was taken to the hospital where he died.

Pennsylvannia Ave

Picture source: Google

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truck rear ends carNew technologies that can help prevent truck accidents such as  forward collision avoidance and mitigation braking (F-CAM) systems should be mandatory on all new big trucks and buses according to The Truck Safety Coalition, the Center for Auto Safety, Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety and Road Safe America. These four lobbyists have sent a joint petition to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to ask the agency to start working on a regulation that would require manufacturers of big trucks and buses to equip all their new vehicles with forward collision avoidance and mitigation braking systems (F-CAM).  When a truck or a bus  is equipped with a Forward Collision Warning System, the driver is warned by a signal that he is getting too close to a “target” in front of him and if he doesn’t react, the Collision Mitigation Braking (CMB) will automatically apply the brakes  to reduce the impact speed or prevent the collision. The F-Cam system integrates both these technologies. This system has been studied by the NHTSA for a decade now. More recently the NHTSA also published a complete evaluation of the installation of F-Cam system on medium to heavy commercial vehicles that shows the benefits of such a system.

According the the most recent statistics, more than 100,000 people suffer personal injury in truck accidents and close to 4000 of them are dying every year. A large portion of these crashes are rear-end crashes in which the large truck is the striking vehicle that crashed into another vehicle on the roadway.  While every new manufacturer is proposing the F-Cam system on their new new trucks, only 3 % of the trucks on the road are equipped with it. Making this equipment mandatory seems to be the only way to achieve widespread implementation.  Download a PDF of the Petition for Rulemaking

 

 

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Since 2009, the FDA has been aware that duodenoscopes manufactured by Japanese companies Olympus, Pentax and Fujifilm have been at the origin of the spread of sometimes fatal spread of pathogens but did nothing to change the situation. Hospitals that faced such outbreaks began sterilizing the devices more rigorously and the transmission of dangerous disease stopped. Therefore, the suspicion was that the superbug outbreak happened because of medical malpractice during which the hospital staff didn’t respect the sterilization procedure. However for the first time on Thursday the FDA said that even hospitals that fully respected the sterilization process could have their devices infected by the superbug. However the FDA didn’t propose to improve the sterilization procedures. They only issued a “safety communication” warning healthcare providers that duodenoscopes’ “complex design” may impede effective sterilization.  The problematic part is a movable “elevator” mechanism at the tip of the duodenoscope: Its moving parts have microscopic crevices where bodily fluids can remain after standard cleaning.  The FDA and the manufacturers are aware of this deadly manufacturing flaw but the FDA didn’t require the manufacturers to improve their device either. Read more on Reuters

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The Transport Workers Union says that the new law penalizing drivers who have injured or killed a pedestrian after they failed to yield should not apply to bus drivers and that it is supporting a proposed amendment in the City Council to exclude bus drivers from the law.  This statement from the bus drivers Union follows the arrest last week of Francisco de Jesus, a bus driver who severely injured a 15 year old girl after he failed to yield and struck her in the crosswalk (see previous blog).   The bus driver is facing fines of up to $250 or 30 days in jail.  Vision Zero proponents believes the punishment is not excessive and should apply to all drivers including bus drivers. Read more in the New York Times

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Reports of  medical staff suffering personal injury after being attacked by patients or patient’s visitors are on the rise.  Recent cases of extreme violence such as one involving a 68 year old patient attacking nurses with a metallic bar that he pulled from a bed (see video) or the death of a prominent cardiologist at a Boston Hospital who was shot by a gunman last month have led hospitals to revisit their security policy.

Shootings in hospitals are not that common but violence against hospital staff is happening daily. Workers are being kicked, scratched, punched beaten and even sexually assaulted by patients. Emergency room and psychiatric nurses and other workers dealing with elderly patients are the most at risk of being assaulted and injured by a patient. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics hospital workers are five time more likely to be assaulted on their jobs than workers in other industries.  Last year a study entitled “Incidence and Cost of Nurse Workplace Violence Perpetrated by Hospital Patients or Patient Visitors” and published by  the Journal of Emergency Nursing indicates that in the last year 76% of nurses experienced violence  (verbal abuse by patients, 54.2%; physical abuse by patients, 29.9%; verbal abuse by visitors, 32.9%; and physical abuse by visitors, 3.5%). Perpetrators were primarily white male patients, aged 26 to 35 years, who were confused or influenced by alcohol or drugs.

Hospitals have started to initiate various programs to train their staff on how to recognize and deescalate potentially violent situations but too little is being done to stop the assaults. According to a recent article, Epidemic of Violence against Health Care Workers Plagues Hospitals  published in Scientific American,  hospital administrators and the judicial system do little to prevent assaults by patients. The cost of violence prevention is small, however, when compared to the amount that hospitals lose in worker-compensation claims every year and in time off due to injury—roughly a third of which is patient-inflicted, according to OSHA statistics.

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The risk  of fire accidents increases during the cold weather as New Yorkers are sometimes using dangerous alternative heating sources, particularly space heaters.  Last Sunday a 78 year old lady was found unconscious in her kitchen and pronounced dead  after a fire erupted in the middle of the night in her apartment in Bedford Park in the Bronx, NYC. On Monday a 30 year old mother and her 15 and 4 year old children from Brooklyn, NYC were forced to jump from a three story  window onto a scaffolding after a blaze ravaged the housing project they were living in. The mother was injured and broke her legs as she landed. On Tuesday a 4 year old boy was critically injured as he suffered burns and smoke inhalation in another house fire that erupted in Bensonhurst, Broolyn, NYC.

With the coming weather, we would like to remind New Yorkers about the dangers alternative heating sources such as space heaters can present and provide tips on how to protect their homes and families while trying to stay warm. Here is a video from the Consumer Reports that provides useful tips to Use Home Heating Equipment Safely to Prevent Fire.

 

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Medical negligence by doctors or medical staff who do not respect cleaning procedures or fail to discard contaminated implements are often the reason why hospital patients are getting infected by contaminated instruments.  Yesterday, UCLA Medical Center announced that 179 patients may have been infected by the super-bug bacteria carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE) transmitted by two infected endoscopes during diagnosis and treatment of pancreatic and bile duct problems. The hospital also said that two patients died of complications related to this issue. Outbreaks of CRE and other superbugs are a major issue among hospitals in the USA and all over the world. A recent study  found that if the rampant spread of super-bugs wasn’t halted it could kill up to 10 million people a year worldwide and cost $100 trillion. Read more in the New York Daily News

 

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On February 4th, around 11 pm, Marco Orellana was hit by a car on North Conduit Avenue near JFK airport. He was transported to the hospital in critical condition. The police announced yesterday  that the man died from his injuries on February 11th. The police also said that they were still investigating the accident. During the accident, The 32 year old driver first struck the pedestrian and then rear-ended a parked car. He stayed at the scene and wasn’t charged. Read more in NewsDay

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When a car accident occurs, some cars are safer than others and will  protect occupants from severe personal injury or death more effectively. The Buick encore and its cheaper version, the Chevrolet Trax just earned the Top Safety Pick award from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. To qualify for Top Safety Pick a car  must earn a “good” or “acceptable” rating for small overlap protection and a “good” rating in the institute’s moderate overlap front, side, roof strength and head restraint crash tests. The 2015 Encore received the highest score (“good”) in the small overlap crash test compared to the 2014 model which was rated “poor” in the same test a year before. The small overlap test replicates a collision during which the front corner of a car hits another car or an object such as a light pole or a tree. Read more in the IIHS press release

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Trellis 6In December, Covidien announced a voluntary recall of  its Trellis-6™ and Trellis-8™ peripheral infusion systems  after customers reported a manufacturing error where the proximal and distal balloon inflation ports were labeled incorrectly resulting in the potential for incorrect sequence of balloon deflation. An incorrect sequence of balloon deflation  could potentially create blood clots that could travel downstream and go to the lungs and seriously injure the patient. Today Medtronic, that just acquired Covidien announced that the recall has now been classified as a class I recall by the FDA. Read more in the press release

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