Kansas City, MO Personal Injury Blog

Rock star Bret Michaels recently settled his premises liability lawsuit with the organizers of the Tony Awards. The Poison-frontman seriously injured himself on the set of the 2009 Tony Awards when he was hit in the head by descending piece of the set after his band performed "Nothin' But a Good Time."

Property owners and possessors generally have a duty to warn invitees of hazards which are not obviously visible. In this case, the rocker said that he was unaware that there would be a set change immediately after his performance and that the organizers of the award show were negligent in failing to warn him of the moving set pieces.

The chemical benzene is used in a variety of solvents, detergents, plastics and synthetic fibers, paints and other products. Benzene is also found in the fracking fluid used to extract natural gas from underground. Benzene is a major water contaminant in areas where fracking has taken place.

Benzene has been linked to a number of serious diseases, including several types of leukemia, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, Hodgkin's disease, MDS, multiple myeloma and aplastic anemia. Employees who work around petroleum products, petroleum-based industrial solvents, gas fumes, oil and coal emissions and paint are at most risk of toxic exposure.

Many child booster seats aren't protecting kids. That's according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, an insurance watchdog group that recently reviewed and rated many models of child booster seats for fit with a variety of vehicle seatbelt restraints. Once children outgrow forward-facing safety seats, they move into booster seats, which are designed to allow seatbelts to fit the children for optimal protection (and to avoid greater injury caused by an improperly fitting adult seat belt, in some cases). Proper fit for a booster seat can depend on the child's height and weight, and booster seats are generally designed to fit children four- to eight-years-old.

The IIHS provided ratings of "best bet," "good bet" or "check fit" ratings for over 80 booster seat models. "Check fit" ratings indicated that parents should evaluate how their child's booster seat, when connected to the vehicle's safety restraints, protects the child. Nearly half - 41 booster seat models - got a "check fit" rating. Only three dozen of the booster seats tested got a "best bet" or "good bet" rating. The IIHS warned that parents often don't realize the importance of the booster seat's fit for their child, and it also recommended that parents stop using a few child booster seat models that received extremely low ratings in the review.

Several child-safety experts have argued that child safety seats should be federally regulated to ensure proper fit and improve child restraint designs.

Decades ago, the Schilling Air Force Base was located on the grounds of what is now the Salina Municipal Airport, a technical school and the University of Kansas-Salina. As our nation's air force flew in and out of Schilling A.F.B., chemicals such as trichloroethylene (TCE) - a degreaser - and other chemicals were used to maintain the Air Force fleet. Unfortunately, TCE and other chemicals were spilled and leaked into the soil and groundwater, creating a toxic mess that polluted the land and water in and around Salina.

Local residents living near this environmental and toxic exposure could face increased risk for certain diseases. TCE has been linked to damage to the liver and lungs, irregular heartbeat, central nervous system issues, coma, and sometimes even death. Just this month, the Environmental Protection Agency stated that TCE is now a known carcinogen and definitively linked to kidney cancer, liver cancer and non-Hodgkin lymphoma, as reported by the Jacksonville Daily News in North Carolina. The EPA's report also found some evidence linking trichloroethylene and cancers of the bladder, cervix, prostate, esophagus, breast, as well as childhood leukemia. Residents and former military service personnel living on or near other military installations such as Camp Lejeune in North Carolina have hailed the EPA's findings on TCE and questioned why it took so long for federal agencies to review the effects of TCE.

More than 5,000 children are injured every year in falls from windows. Some 25 percent of those falls cause injuries serious enough to require hospitalization, such as broken bones or neck and back injuries. A very small number of window falls were fatal, according to a leading researcher on window falls at the Center for Injury Research and Policy.

Not surprisingly, about two-thirds of all window falls involve toddlers. Researchers say this is because small children have a higher center of gravity, they are highly curious but lack a sense of danger, and they have less developed balance.

While many major cities have ordinances requiring high rise apartment buildings to have safety devices designed to prevent someone from falling out of windows, many of the injured children fall from the second story of a house. Most single family dwellings do not have safety devices on upstairs windows, and many Missouri cities and counties do not require rental homes to have safety devices to prevent window falls. For example, in Independence, the city code notes that bars and grills that might prevent window falls are optional and need to include easy release features so that windows can be used to escape in the event of a fire.

If the Jeopardy answer was "technology used to help patient care in the near future," the question could relate to computer topography, echo analysis or nano medical robots. But another question would be "What is Watson?" Watson, the ultimate Jeopardy champion, will soon be the newest technology used in the healthcare industry as a diagnostic tool. On September 12, IBM and WellPoint, a national health benefits company, announced their agreement to create the world's first commercial applications of the IBM Watson technology to assist physicians to avoid improperly diagnosing and treating serious conditions.

IBM's Watson technology, a computing system that rivals human abilities to process natural language, is named for the company's founder, Thomas J. Watson. The existing supercomputing system analyzes the meaning and context of language, processes the information and then suggests options. Under the IBM-WellPoint agreement, the Watson-based solutions would target patient care needs and suggest potential diagnoses such as cancer, stroke or heart attack. The Watson diagnostic tool could also suggest treatment plans to providers.

In creating this master diagnostic and care tool, IBM and WellPoint will incorporate millions of pages of practice-related articles and resources. The Watson application would be able to process resource information in seconds. Medical care professionals would then use Watson's guidance to compare patient histories, test results and recommended protocols to the most current research data. IBM and WellPoint believe that the risk of physician cognitive errors, attribution prejudices and availability biases would be greatly diminished.

At the request of leading spinal cord injury researchers, Congress has designated September to be National Spinal Cord Injury Awareness Month. According to the website of the Miami Project to Cure Paralysis, "every 48 minutes someone in the U.S. is paralyzed from a spinal cord injury." The National Spinal Cord Injury Statistical Center (NSCISC) reports that about 12,000 new spinal cord injuries (SCI) occur every year in the United States.

The NSCISC provides an annual fact sheet on SCI based on data from injury reports. According to the fact sheet, the main causes of spinal cord injury in the United States are:

• Motor vehicle accidents (40 percent)
• Falls (27 percent)
• Assaults or violence (15 percent) and
• Sports injuries (8 percent)

Whether the result of a serious car accident, a fall, a sports injury, or another cause, a spinal cord injury has devastating consequences for injury victims and there is currently no known cure.

Heart surgery is risky and therefore is only undertaken when absolutely necessary. And yet a number of situations have arisen across the U.S. in which doctors appear to have put their own financial interests before the medical needs of the patient. In three high-profile cases cardiologists are being investigated for performing possibly unnecessary surgeries, resulting in criminal charges and medical malpractice claims.

• As many as 585 potentially unnecessary heart stent surgeries were performed in Baltimore
• A suspected 200 potentially unnecessary heart stent surgeries were performed in Connecticut
• An as-yet unidentified number of potentially unnecessary heart stent surgeries were performed in Tennessee