Prius brakes
As if Toyota didn't have enough safety quality issues, now there is evidence of a serious safety problem on their hybrid Prius. The brakes fail causing injury and death.
Product Recall Due to Plastic Chips in Meals
Several varieties of Lean Cuisine frozen meals were recalled in late November after seven different customers reported finding pieces of hard blue plastic in their meals. According to a spokesman for Nestle Prepared Foods Co., the company that owns Lean Cuisine, at least one consumer was injured when a piece of plastic in the meal cut the person's gums.
Chopped Up Plastic in the Meals
"A tray may have broken and chip-chopped into the product," said Roz Ahearn of Nestle. On the Lean Cuisine website, the company describes the product recall in detail, noting first that the three types of meals being recalled are:
- Lean Cuisine Spa Cuisine Chicken Mediterranean
- Lean Cuisine Dinnertime Selects Chicken Tuscan
- Lean Cuisine Café Classics Pesto Chicken with Bow Tie Pasta
Not All of the Meal Varieties
The website notes that the recall is of only meals of these varieties with certain production codes, listed on the site. The production code is given on the right end flap of the meal. Most of the recalled meals have an expiration date in 2009 or 2010.
Lean Cuisine Spa Cuisine Chicken Mediterranean
8231 5959
8241 5959
8263 5959
8269 5959
8274 5959
8291 5959
8301 5959
Lean Cuisine Dinnertime Selects Chicken Tuscan
8234 5959
8253 5959
8269 5959
8292 5959
8296 5959
Lean Cuisine Café Classics Pesto Chicken with Bow Tie Pasta
8280 5959
Nestle says that it has determined that the blue plastic contaminating the meals entered a facility in a single lot (batch) of a raw ingredient. Over one million of the three Lean Cuisine meals are being recalled.
(Source: Washington Post)
What do you think about the FDA's ability to screen the food we eat?
Aircraft Safety
Passengers recently collected at airports around the nation waiting for a flight while American Airlines commit a crash program of safety repairs that should have been done long before. This chaos closely followed the embarrassment suffered by Southwest Airlines. Aviation is a safe method of transportation but is unforgiving. The lack of regulatory control over such issues as safety inspections of airliners is shocking but typical of the cozy relationship between the Bush administration and industry. The odd-man out is the consumer.
Not only were the airlines only required to voluntarily report safety issues, the FAA allowed some reporting to slide altogether. Only low level FAA inspectors would receive reports. As a result of this news the FAA is instituting steps that one would have thought to have already been standard procedure. Among those steps is forcing high-ranking airline personnel to submit reports to the FAA of safety problems or compliance issues filed voluntarily by airline employees. In the past, lower-level airline workers could make such disclosures.
Transportation officials said yesterday that new rules will also require senior-level FAA officials to receive those reports to ensure that rogue inspectors are not being too lenient on the airlines.
The last line of defense for consumers is the right to trial by jury. Without the empowerment of trial, industries providing products and services can skate. It is silly to think that deterrence can be left to regulators. Both remedy for injury and deterrence for violation of safety standards must remain with the courts and juries. We must stop the insurance and corporate powers from destroying our Constitutional right to trial by jury.
http://www.bailey-law.com/lawyer-attorney-1215486.html
Railroad Workplace Safety
Some acts of negligence are the result of situational decisions. Split second decisions while driving a car can be the product of negligence that foreseeably cause injury to another. At thirty miles an hour, a person’s car gains forty-four feet a second. For that reason, the fate of others is determined in a heartbeat.
Other acts of negligence are made by premeditated corporate calculations in a boardroom. These decisions have no excuse from being made under pressure.
One of the decisions made by railroad companies is to use property not owned by them to conduct their business. Parking lots of retail businesses or unused city properties are examples of workplaces for railroad workers in maintenance of way. Workers are ordered to show up at these places to organize crews, pick up equipment and trucks.
There are two characteristics of these non-railroad property workplaces:
1. It is free to the railroad company.
2. There is no practical way that the railroad company can honor its duty to provide workplace safety.
A classic example of this mismanagement occurred in the small town of Nebraska City, Nebraska in which Union Pacific Railroad Co ordered employees to pick up trucks and organized work gangs on municipal property under a viaduct. This out-of-the-way property was not used or supervised by Nebraska City. The railroad did not reach an agreement or even inform Nebraska City of its free use of this property.
Union Pacific did not determine that the property was being supervised by the city or undertaken the duty itself. As a practical matter Union Pacific could not assure the safety of the property as a workplace. No permanent supervision or security was in force. It is important to note that this is not an isolated occurrence but exists today throughout the United States.
A maintenance of way employee showed up at this site under orders to pick up a truck. He arrived a day after a snow storm. While walking up to the truck, he fell into an open manhole. The manhole cover had been removed by someone--an act of some effort that could have never gone unnoticed in a supervised railroad property. This bizarre violation of workplace safety occurred as a result of a cold, calculated decision by management to save money and unethically use municipal property without permission or arraignments. This management decision is occurring today and will occur tomorrow.
Attorneys representing workers in FELA cases should take to task the railroad companies putting their workers at risk by trespassing on property owned by others.
http://www.bailey-law.com/lawyer-attorney-1215842.html
http://www.bailey-law.com/lawyer-attorney-1215842.html
Lawyer's role in product safety
Los Angeles-based consumer attorney, William A. "Bill" Daniels hosts http://billdanielsblog.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/07/so-great-to-see.html and quotes an interesting article that points out the obvious. Who do we have to safeguard our rights against unreasonable dangerous products? Government bureaucrats? Ultimately, we must rely upon the free enterprise system supported by our open courts. As long as manufacturers and promoters of products for us and our families know that plaintiffs’ attorneys are willing to aggressively put their representations of safety to the test, we will have a chance for reasonable product safety research and development. The following is an excerpt from the article on Daniel’s site. I recommend that you click on his blog to read the rest.
By Jeffrey Pfeffer, Business 2.0 Magazine columnist
July 9 2007: 6:21 AM EDT
(Business 2.0 Magazine) -- Decades after Tylenol bottles were tampered with and Ford Pintos exploded, you'd think that product-safety panics would be nearing extinction.
No such luck. Consider just the past few months: Pet food laced with poison killed more than a dozen dogs and cats. Toothpaste shipped from China to Latin America turned out to be tainted with a potentially fatal thickening agent. And the FDA issued yet another recall for defective defibrillators, bringing the total number of heart devices that need to be replaced to nearly 200,000.
Check out http://www.bailey-law.com/lawyer-attorney-1215486.html to learn more about the trial lawyer practice of products liability.
By Jeffrey Pfeffer, Business 2.0 Magazine columnist
July 9 2007: 6:21 AM EDT
(Business 2.0 Magazine) -- Decades after Tylenol bottles were tampered with and Ford Pintos exploded, you'd think that product-safety panics would be nearing extinction.
No such luck. Consider just the past few months: Pet food laced with poison killed more than a dozen dogs and cats. Toothpaste shipped from China to Latin America turned out to be tainted with a potentially fatal thickening agent. And the FDA issued yet another recall for defective defibrillators, bringing the total number of heart devices that need to be replaced to nearly 200,000.
Check out http://www.bailey-law.com/lawyer-attorney-1215486.html to learn more about the trial lawyer practice of products liability.
