ThePopTort

Drink to Your Health But Watch Out for Water

News broke over the weekend about the new Environmental Working Group (EWG) study, released today, showing that, “Tap water from 31 of 35 U.S. cities tested contains hexavalent chromium (or chromium-6), the carcinogenic ‘Erin Brockovich chemical,’ with the 'highest levels were detected in Norman, Okla.; Honolulu, Hawaii; and Riverside, Calif.'"  That’s about 74 million Americans in 42 states – at least.  This nasty chemical “is commonly discharged from steel and pulp mills as well as metal-plating and leather-tanning facilities. It can also pollute water through erosion of soil and rock.”  Yum.

Add this to the atrazine crisis we coverd earlier this year and it seems to me that drinking water has lately become pretty deadly in America.  Or at least, we are just now finding out about it thanks to the good work of environmental groups.

As the Washington Post reported over the weekend, the EWG study “comes as the Environmental Protection Agency is considering whether to set a limit for hexavalent chromium in tap water. The agency is reviewing the chemical after the National Toxicology Program, part of the National Institutes of Health, deemed it a ‘probable carcinogen’ in 2008.”

Erin Brockovich told the paper, "This chemical has been so widely used by so many industries across the U.S. that this doesn't surprise me. … Our municipal water supplies are in danger all over the U.S.  This is a chemical that should be regulated."

Here’s the science: “Hexavalent chromium has long been known to cause lung cancer when inhaled, but scientists only recently found evidence that it causes cancer in laboratory animals when ingested. It has been linked in animals to liver and kidney damage as well as leukemia, stomach cancer and other cancers.”

So, 2008.  Why is regulation taking so long?  Well, probably some of this is due to the industry disinformation compaign.  As EWG reported,

PG&E [the company responsible in the Brockovich case] hired consultants to publish a fraudulent analysis of cancer mortality in Chinese villagers exposed to hexavalent chromium, in an attempt to disprove the link between the chemical and cancer. The study was published in the respected Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, and scientists and regulators — including the EPA — cited the fraudulent article in research and safety assessments. The journal retracted the paper in 2006 in response to EWG’s request for corrective action.

Speaking of 2008, that’s actually the last time we covered hexavalent chromium, after 60 Mintues reported that soldiers in Iraq, tasked with protecting KBR contractors at a water plant contaminted with hexavalent chromium, were dying from lung cancer.  Hexavalent chromium.  The gift that keeps on giving.

The Land of Milk And Mess Ups

Dallas-based national dairy processor Dean Foods was forcing farmers in Vermont and other northeastern states to work with them.  Now they are going to pay - $30 million, that is - to settle a class-action suit for this violation of federal antitrust laws.  (The deal awaits court approval.)  Also today, Dean “announced plans to issue $400 million in new debt to pay down old debt and named a new chief accounting officer.”

Take note, dairy farms. Just cause you’re “getting squeezed by big-box stores and supermarket chains looking for price concessions” so that your stock “is off 53 percent this year, making it the worst performer in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index” does not mean you get to violate the law.

And by the way, that also includes producing raw milk with E. Coli.

In Minnesota,

State Agriculture Department investigators Tuesday seized hundreds of gallons raw milk and other food produced by a Gibbon dairy farm that has kept churning out product despite a state order to stop.  Raw milk produced by Mike Hartmann's farm was fingered by the state for eight cases of E. coli O157:H7 in May, and seven instances in July and August of other stomach bugs that cause diarrhea and abdonimal pain.…

Seized were 'hundreds of gallons of raw milk', along with cream, yogurt, cheese and meat. … Raw milk isn't pasteurized -- treated with heat to kill pathogens -- and public health authorities widely decry it as dangerous. But some natural food advocates see it as a healthful tonic of sorts, superior in taste and nutrients.

Hhmm … nah.

Congressional Stalls

The last time we remember anyone talking about Congress and stalls in the same sentence, the topic was the men’s room at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport and a certain "wide stance" Senator.   

Ah, those were the days.  Now, the headlines go something like “Senate Bill on Food Safety Is Stalled.”  This is lot more serious.  

Seems like despite numerous food safety scandals (some of which we’re covered here, here, here,) Tea Party fav Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) has decided to single-handedly block a food safety bill that “has broad bipartisan support, is a priority for the Obama administration and has the backing of both industry and consumer groups.”  

Meanwhile, the New York Times' editorial yesterday blasted similar politicking that has kept the Senate from passing critical mine safety legislation following the many mine tragedies, most prominent the Upper Big Branch mine explosion in West Virginia that killed 29 (here, here).  The Times also mentions that Congress is stalling passing legislation to help the families of 11 workers killed in the explosion, which we wrote about last week, not to mention raising the total liability cap from $75 million, . 

But that’s not to say everyone in Congress is stalling.  For example, last week the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Health Subcommittee passed a bill to fix something we’ve covered here: “the growing concerns about concussions and other serious head injuries among school-aged children.”  This bill passed the sub-committee after a hearing with “student athletes, trainers, sports doctors and brain injury specialists at the home of the New Jersey Devils.” (There’s a full Committee hearing this week.)

Then it goes over to the Senate.  There go those flushing sounds in my head again! 

How Do You Solve a Problem Like John Stossel?

Remember in the Sound of Music, when the nuns sing, “How do you solve a problem like Maria?” … “How do you find a word that means Maria?  A flibbertijibbet! A will-o'-the wisp! A clown”? 

I’m not quite sure what a flibbertijibbet exactly is, but I do know a will-o'-the wisp clown when I see one.  That would be the Fox Business Network's new Thursday night start, John Stossel.  John Stossel is a problem that clearly needs solving.

Take his latest weird diatribe last night (“Parasitic Tort Lawyers”) and accompanying column, which he begins with the words, “Tort lawyers lie.”  And he then goes on to trash the entire profession of attorneys who try to hold corporate wrongdoers accountable in court on behalf of injured people.  I suppose that might be believable coming from a guy who once said “Enron is an example of how well the market worked for people.”  Except well, turns out, like all good hypocrites, he has no problem running to court himself when he feels like it, like when he once sued a pro wrestler who hit him after Stossel implied pro wrestling was fake, and he got $200,000 for his pain and suffering.

So I guess Stossel’s problem isn’t himself.  It’s everybody else who uses the court - and their attorneys who “say their product liability suits are good for us. But their lawsuits rarely make our lives better.” OK let’s see. 

How about lawsuits that have saved thousands of womens’ lives?  How about just children?  Communities living around toxic pollution?  Food safety?  (Even CNN’s Sanjay Gupta came through on this one.)  Cars, airplanes, cleaning products, we could go on – and on – and on.  And actually we did, a few years ago, here.

When he says all the fun of playgrounds and such were “taken away” because of lawsuits – that’s a lie. 

And when he says lawsuits are stifling innovation, that’s a lie.

And when he suggests that without lawsuits, savings due to “defensive medicine” would be anything more than 0.2% of health care costs, that’s a lie.

I know we keep using the term "tone deaf" to describe these people, but really now? 

Sanjay Gupta, Lawsuits and Food Safety

We know that CNN’s resident neurosurgeon, Sanjay Gupta, is one busy guy.  Understandably, he doesn’t always have a lot of time to make sure everything he says on the air is actually correct.  Like the pretty deficient work he did leading up to a live on the air attack of Michael Moore’s health care film, Sicko. 

Or perhaps more relevant to ThePopTort, supporting his complaints about medical malpractice litigation by mistakenly saying that the Congressional Budget Office did not factor in the cost of so-called “defensive medicine” when deciding on a tiny 0.5% figure to reflect what would be saved had the health care bill included severe “tort reform.”  Defensive medicine was indeed part of that miniscule CBO figure.

So we were more than pleased to see Gupta’s show this weekend featuring food safety activist and advocate Bill Marler – a fantastic trial lawyer. We’ve written before about attorney Marler and his important work on behalf of poisoned consumers, most recently around that disgusting peanut butter salmonella outbreak that killed at least six people and injured many more.  We're glad Dr. Gupta likes Mr. Marler too, especially his important work as a trial lawyer, getting to the bottom of the most recent E. coli lettuce outbreak and making sure people are compensated.

He seems like such a nice guy so we’re not going to put the label “hypocrite” on Dr. Gupta today.  So no ticket this time.  This one’s just a warning.

Happy as a Pig Farm in Slop

That silly “lipstick on a pig” brouhaha during the 2008 presidential election campaign came to mind today when we read about a Missouri jury verdict yesterday.  The jury awarded around $11 million to folks living near an 80,000-head hog farm run by industrial food giant Premium Standard Farms, now owned by Smithfield Foods and the state's largest hog producer, over the operation’s stifling and intolerable odors. The awards weren’t huge: “$825,000 for each of the 13 plaintiffs. A 14th plaintiff was awarded $250,000, and the 15th got $75,000” and included no punitive damages.

The company is appealing, calling it a “gang trial” and a “gang verdict.” They also believe it was unfair because the company complied with government regulations – an argument we’ve heard before and one that the U.S. Supreme Court isn’t too fond of.

Mostly what the families want is odor abatement.  Their attorney said, "’If we sit down and talk, we can include more than money,’ ... ‘It's common sense. Nobody wants to live across the street from 80,000 hogs.’”

Premium Standards Farms has itself had its own problems.  Last month, 1,500 northern Missouri residents met with the state Attorney General because of an upcoming deadline for the company to comply with a 1999 court order to implement “$25 million in pollution-reducing equipment” – the deadline has been expanded since “and is still being implemented.”  Meanwhile, “In January, the U.S. Justice Department also reached a $900,000 settlement with Smithfield Foods Inc. and Premium Standard Farms over premerger rule violations.”  (here)

Missouri, it turns out, has a strong history of trying to get local control over operation of these huge corporate hog farms.  The Wall Street Journal wrote:

As livestock operations have grown more industrialized, residents across rural America have banded together to try to keep them out. They say the bigger farms are wreaking havoc on their communities, polluting waterways with manure that can kill fish and sicken people. A popular tool has been county-level "local control" ordinances that govern where a large farm can locate.

While many states have retained authority over the siting of livestock farms, Missouri has a staunch local-control movement that took root in the early 1990s as corporate-controlled hog processors moved in. In 1999, the Missouri Court of Appeals held that a county can implement an ordinance governing livestock farms, including where they are located, if it is rooted in concerns over public health. Today, more than a dozen of Missouri's 114 counties have the ordinances.

Another thing lipstick clearly can’t mask – the smell of rotten eggs. 

Today’s Distressing Safety Checklist

If you’re planning to go outside today, don’t get hurt, be careful driving, watch what you eat – or at least, be very very careful!  Here’s what we found in the news today:

1. A revealing yet frightening column in the New York Times written by medical students who say that the culture of medicine fails miserably to emphasize and teach patient safety.  Contrary to those who blame malpractice litigation for the culture of secrecy in medicine (we don’t! ), this column reveals that even medical students who see errors and try to speak up “run the risk of being labeled ‘troublemakers’ and ‘naïve,’” and they “suggest a pressing need for a cultural shift, one that dissolves the secrecy surrounding medical errors and allows trainees and seasoned doctors to speak openly about their mistakes and those their colleagues have made.”  Can we please stop blaming injured patients and their lawyers for this now?

2. Following evidence at trial that a unit of Kimberly-Clark “encouraged surgeons to use a ‘pain pump,’ in an unapproved and unsafe manner” that “caused severe cartilage deterioration” and left a “38-year-old father of four with constant pain and a disabled arm,” a jury awarded him $4.75 million, setting the stage for other cases. 

3. Speaking of medical devices, especially the really dangerous ones that manufacturers can now produce without any fear of liability, the FDA just approved a new Medtronic heart valve “under its humanitarian device exemption policy” i.e., “a device is approved for limited use on the assurance that its health benefits outweigh the risk of injury or illness.”  And somehow they’re trusting Medtronic on this?

4. As to Toyota’s sticking-throttle recall, turns out that “it knew there were problems with accelerator-pedal assemblies from supplier CTS late last year” but did nothing, and “Toyota continues selling models involved in the recall, expecting that they work fine because they are new and the throttles don't seem to begin sticking until the vehicle ages.”  Yikes!

5.  And then on the food front, “A Rhode Island meat company recalled 1.24 million pounds of pepper-coated salami on Saturday, after officials conducting a months-long, multistate investigation of a salmonella outbreak compared shopping receipts of those who got sick. ..the recall by Daniele International Inc. comes amid an outbreak that's sickened 184 people in 38 states since July."

Uh, on second thought, maybe stay home today?

Compensation for Victims of Poison Peanuts—But for “Old” Chrysler/GM Victims, Not Even Peanuts

Remember the argument being touted by Chrysler and GM, numerous pundits and even the Obama administration not so long ago?  You know, the one that said wiping out the rights of those injured by the companies’ faulty products before they emerged from bankruptcy was unavoidable and/or simply par for the course in any bankruptcy proceeding?

Well that was hooey then and it’s hooey now.  Just ask the makers of the Dalkon Shield IUD who set aside funds to compensate the thousands of women injured or killed by their product before entering bankruptcy.

Be that as it may…you can imagine our reaction recently when we read that a U.S. bankruptcy judge “ordered Peanut Corporation of America's insurance carrier to set aside $12 million to reimburse people for health complications that resulted from eating tainted peanut products.”

I mean, hooray for the peanut victims, absolutely!  But memo to the “new” Chrysler and GM: the old “impossibility” argument just gets flimsier and flimsier by the day, don’t you think?  Sort of makes a person want to buy cars from companies that will actually stand by their loyal customers and products instead of say, tap dancing around about what’s possible and what isn’t when it comes to bankruptcy.

Nestle Cookie Dough E. Coli Update

We told you several days ago about a young woman who filed a lawsuit against Nestle after some of the company’s cookie dough put her in the hospital with E. coli poisoning.  Here are some related developments.

The FDA has confirmed that it found E. coli in a sample of Nestle Toll House Refrigerated Cookie dough at Nestle’s Danville, VA plant.

This same plant “refused to give inspectors access to pest-control records, environmental-testing programs and other information, according to newly released inspection reports covering the past five years.”

No wonder the cause of the E. coli outbreak remains a mystery.  Cookie dough has been linked to salmonella (due to its raw egg component), but not the particular strain of E. Coli at issue here (which derives from the intestines of cattle). 

Meanwhile, tainted-dough-related lawsuits, which hopefully will help dig up the truth, continue to mount (here, here, here).

E. Coli-Tainted Nestle Cookie Dough Puts California Teen in the Hospital

You may have heard that one of America’s favorite guilty pleasures—Nestle cookie dough—has unfortunately joined the ranks of “spinach, lettuce, jalapenos, beef, pet food, peanut butter, pistachios and alfalfa sprouts” (among other ingestible items) as a member of America’s recalled/tainted food club.  So far, 70 people nationwide have contracted E. coli from the toxic stuff, and of that, 30 have been hospitalized.

One of those sickened, 18-year-old Jillian Collins of San Carlos, CA ended up having to be hospitalized for seven days in agonizing pain.  She has since filed suit against Nestle, providing yet another example of the essential role lawsuits play in holding negligent food producers accountable and ensuring those harmed are compensated for their injuries.  (See video below.)

We’ll just add this one to ThePopTort's tainted food "Hall of Shame." (here, here, here, here).