How to prevent construction accidents in New York? The NYC Department of Buildings seminar “2014 Build Safe” is an event during which engineers, architects and construction experts will outline recent New York industry trends and discuss a vision for the future of construction operations in the City.
The program also includes several construction safety courses for professional credit.
Click here to register or learn more about it
Drug manufacturers are liable for the safety of their products. Mostly for profit reason some trial results may be overlooked and drugs may be launched on the market with dangerous side effects. A recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that patients with diabetes using the drug saxagliptin had an increased risk to be hospitalized for heart failure.
For this reason The FDA just published a safety announcement that it requested clinical trial data from the manufacturer of saxagliptin to investigate a possible association between use of the type 2 diabetes drug and heart failure.
Read the Safety Announcement from the FDA
Unnecessary use of antipsychotic and antidepressant drugs by nursing homes has lead to abuse and has been a preoccupation of the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) for many years. A proposal for a new rule to modify access to antidepressants and antipsychotic drugs was published by the CMS last month. The CMS proposes to eliminate the antidepressant drugs and some immunosuppressant drugs from the list of protective classes by the beginning of 2015. The antipsychotic drugs would be removed from the protected list a year after to facilitate medication transition for people taking these drugs. While some believe that this change of policy would reduce the overuse and misuse of antipsychotic drugs by nursing homes others believe that unnecessary change of antipsychotic drugs in a patient can have very negative consequences for his or her health. What do you think?
The CMS is accepting comments on this proposal until March 7th 2014.
Read more in Annals of Long Term Care
A commercial truck driver crushed a pedestrian in Brooklyn and just sped off as the man was left unconscious. The 70 year old pedestrian was pushing a shopping cart alongside a parked commercial truck. When the pedestrian was at the level of the cab door, the truck pulled out, crushed the man and continued without stopping. The man was found unconscisous at the place of the accident and died at the hospital. The police are still looking for a dark color three axle truck.
Read more in New York CBS
Anyone with information in regards to this incident is asked to call the NYPD’s Crime Stoppers Hotline at 800-577-TIPS. The public can also submit their tips by logging onto the Crime Stoppers Website at WWW.NYPDCRIMESTOPPERS.COM or texting their tips to 274637(CRIMES) then enter TIP577
3 adults were seriously injured in an accident between an ambulance and a school bus that happened yesterday night in Brooklyn, New York. The 16 children who were in the bus suffered only minor injuries.
The ambulance was speeding down Fort Hamilton Parkway and the bus was crossing on 51st street when the accident happened.
Read More in the New York Daily News
Thankfully nobody suffered personal injury in New York after big chunks of ice fell from the Freedom Tower and other buildings from the World Trade Center. Ice patches have been forming on the the sloped roof of the freedom Tower as well as the rounded corner areas. Because the building is still under construction, it is not heated, allowing the ice to build. When the temperature rose at the end of the week, the ice started to melt. Big chunks fell on the ground putting pedestrians at risk of a catastrophic head injury or death. The Police finally closed the street after pedestrians had to run for cover several times. The CDC estimates that every year in the United States 15 people will die from falling ice injury.
Women are at a higher risk of a stroke than men because they have unique risk factors associated with pregnancy and the use of hormones. The guidelines from the American Heart Association and American Stroke Association were the first such recommendations aimed at preventing strokes in women. Stroke is the fourth-leading cause of death for all Americans and a leading cause of disability. It’s the third-leading cause of death for women, after heart disease and cancer.
Read more in the Washington Post
Today Is American Heart Association National Wear Red Day, wear red to show that you support women living longer, stronger lives. Encourage your loved ones to do the same.
Unsafe commercial carriers are the cause of many truck accidents and must be kept off the road. For this purpose the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration launched in 2010 the Compliance, Safety, Accountability (CSA) enforcement program that includes as its main component a tool called the Safety Measurement System (SMS). The CSA and SMS goal was to identify and prioritize motor carriers that pose the highest threat to public safety for enforcement interventions.
At the beginning of this week a study from the Government Accountability Office announced that even though the CSA program was a success, improvement was needed. The watchdog agency was especially worried that the insufficient amount of data obtained from small commercial carriers was not good enough for reliable statistics. The American Trucking Association had previously voiced the same type of warnings.
The FMCSA fought back and came up two days ago with a new study conducted by the Volpe Center, the research arm of the U.S. Transportation Department that confirms CSA effectiveness. Researchers used pre-SMS historical data and to test the system. According to the research, “results show that the companies the SMS would have identified for interventions, such as roadside inspections, warning letters and on-site investigations, had a future crash rate of more than double the national average,” FMCSA said. “In addition, 79% of the carriers that SMS would have ranked as high risk in at least one of the seven safety categories it monitors, had higher future crash rates compared to those it would not have identified”.
In the future some car accidents may be avoided thanks to vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication technology. After a successful Pilot was launched in August 2012, the US Department of Transportation and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration have taken the next step by announcing this week that it was taking steps to equip light vehicles with this amazing technology. (see press release)
Research undertaken during the Pilot phase show that safety applications using V2V technology can address a large majority of crashes involving two or more motor vehicles. With safety data such as speed and location flowing from nearby vehicles, vehicles can identify risks and provide drivers with warnings to avoid other vehicles in common accidents such as rear-end, lane change, and intersection crashes. These safety applications have been demonstrated with everyday drivers under both real-world and controlled test conditions.
In this video an NBC TV crew is testing a pilot car. Its pretty amazing.
Broadway, First Ave, Second Ave and Seventh Ave are the most dangerous roads for pedestrians in Manhattan. According to The Tri-State Transportation Campaign, out of a total of 89 pedestrians who died after being struck by a vehicle in Manhattan between 2010 and 2012, 28 of them died on one of these large avenues.
In the Bronx, where 72 pedestrians were killed on roads,East Gun Hill Road, Fordham Road, The Grand Concourse and White Plains Road had the highest number of pedestrian deaths between 2010 and 2012.
Flatbush Avenue, Ocean Parkway, Atlantic Avenue, Avenue J, Bedford Avenue and Eastern Parkway were the deadliest roads in Brooklyn where 123 pedestrians lost their lives in a vehicle accident between 2010 and 2012.
New York Personal Injury Attorneys Blog