Jury Awards $8.5 Million to Family of Girl Born With Brain Damage

In a medical malpractice case, an appeals court recently affirmed a lower court's award of $8.5 million to the family of a severely brain-damaged woman.

2012-03-22

March 22, 2012 (Press-News.org) In a medical malpractice case, an Ontario appeals court recently affirmed a lower court's award of $8.5 million to the family of a severely brain-damaged woman. Born with cerebral palsy, the woman nearly died at birth due to a nurse's failure to properly monitor her heartbeat during labor. Lawyers for the family said that the nurse didn't measure her heartbeat often enough to detect oxygen deprivation over a period of one to three hours.

The woman, now grown, lives in an assisted care facility and depends on her family for care and financial support. Family members said the award ensures quality care for the rest of her life.

Similar birth injuries happen in the United States. In 2000, a New York jury awarded $12.2 million to the family of a man who was born with severe brain damage. The jury found that a doctor's failure to deliver the baby immediately after the mother's water broke caused her son to be born with cerebral palsy.

In a 2010 New York trial, the family of a deceased woman received $2.2 million from the insurance carriers of three obstetricians. At birth, the obstetricians failed to perform a caesarean section, despite nurses' warnings of the baby's abnormal heart rate. As a result, she was born with cerebral palsy and severe head trauma. Seven years later, she died from a seizure related to her injuries.

Just last year, a Pennsylvania jury awarded $21.6 million to a family whose son was born with cerebral palsy caused by nurses' failure to monitor his heart rate. Most of the award was for the past, present and future expenses related to his medical care.

Children born with cerebral palsy and other birth injuries are often dependent on their families for medical care for the rest of their lives. While jury awards and settlement amounts vary depending on the severity of injury, the families of injured or deceased children are generally entitled to compensation for pain and suffering and medical costs. For more information after you or a loved one suffers a birth injury, speak with an experienced birth injury attorney.

Article provided by Silvers Langsam & Weitzman PC
Visit us at www.birthinjuryinfo.org

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Stanford researchers discover drug target for stimulating recovery from stroke

2012-03-22

STANFORD, Calif. — Investigators at the Stanford University School of Medicine have shown that removing a matched set of molecules that typically help to regulate the brain's capacity for forming and eliminating connections between nerve cells could substantially aid recovery from stroke even days after the event. In experiments with mice, the scientists demonstrated that when these molecules are not present, the mice's ability to recover from induced strokes improved significantly. Importantly, these beneficial effects grew over the course of a full week post-stroke, ...

Experts identify inhibitor causing male pattern baldness and target for hair-loss treatments

2012-03-22

VIDEO: George Cotsarelis, MD, explains that an abnormal amount a protein called Prostaglandin D2 inhibits hair growth in the bald scalp of men, a discovery that may lead directly to new... Click here for more information. PHILADELPHIA - Researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania have identified an abnormal amount a protein called Prostaglandin D2 in the bald scalp of men with male pattern baldness, a discovery that may lead directly to new ...

As industry funding for medical education fades, new opportunities for improvements arise

2012-03-22

Public scrutiny and the threat of government regulation are leading to a decline in industry-sponsored funding of accredited continuing medical education (CME) for physicians, and this decline represents an opportunity to make CME more relevant, cost-effective and less open to bias, wrote a group of physicians from the San Francisco VA Medical Center and the University of California, San Francisco. In a "Perspective" in the March 22 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, the authors predicted the decline will continue, with a "sea change toward greater restriction" ...

The NBA May Soon Look Very Different

2012-03-22

When it next meets, the governing board of the National Basketball Association will consider allowing corporate advertising on players' official game jerseys. According to the Sporting News, the NBA is the last major American sport to have no logos other than the team name on its official game uniforms -- Adidas currently has logos only on NBA warm-ups. Sports such as soccer, NASCAR and even the Women's National Basketball Association have no qualms about giving corporate sponsors prominent placement on vehicles, equipment and jerseys. For example, in 2009 the WNBA's ...

Will you have a heart attack? New test can possibly predict

2012-03-22

SAN DIEGO (Embargoed until 2 pm (ET), March 21, 2012) – New findings from a landmark research study led by Scripps Translational Science Institute (STSI) – a collaborative program between Scripps Health and The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) – shows a promising new blood test may be useful in helping doctors predict who is at risk for an imminent heart attack. Results of the study titled, "Characterization of Circulating Endothelial Cells in Acute Myocardial Infarction," were published this week in Science Translational Medicine. The study concludes that circulating ...

Quantum plasmons demonstrated in atomic-scale nanoparticles

2012-03-22

The physical phenomenon of plasmon resonances in small metal particles has been used for centuries. They are visible in the vibrant hues of the great stained-glass windows of the world. More recently, plasmon resonances have been used by engineers to develop new, light-activated cancer treatments and to enhance light absorption in photovoltaics and photocatalysis. "The stained-glass windows of Notre Dame Cathedral and Stanford Chapel derive their color from metal nanoparticles embedded in the glass. When the windows are illuminated, the nanoparticles scatter specific ...

VISTA stares deep into the cosmos

2012-03-22

ESO's VISTA telescope has been trained on the same patch of sky repeatedly to slowly accumulate the very dim light of the most distant galaxies. In total more than six thousand separate exposures with a total effective exposure time of 55 hours, taken through five different coloured filters, have been combined to create this picture. This image from the UltraVISTA survey is the deepest [1] infrared view of the sky of its size ever taken. The VISTA telescope at ESO's Paranal Observatory in Chile is the world's largest survey telescope and the most powerful infrared survey ...

Study Shows Worker Safety Dependent on High-Level Decisions

2012-03-22

Workplace safety is a major problem in the United States. Every year, approximately 6,000 workers are killed, and millions more are injured, in on-the-job accidents. Safety is everyone's responsibility. Management, however, often tries to place the burden on workers alone. A new study from the University of Georgia shows that this emphasis might be misplaced. It found that high-level decisions about workplace safety and work-life balance can greatly reduce workplace accident rates. The study examined employees' perceptions of workplace climates across a wide variety ...

Antidepressant use during pregnancy and high blood pressure

2012-03-22

Use of selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants during pregnancy appears to be linked with increased risk of pregnancy induced high blood pressure ("hypertension"), but a causal link has not been established. Pregnancy hypertension is sometimes linked with pre-eclampsia, a serious condition that can harm pregnant women and their unborn babies. But the authors stress that pregnant women should not stop taking their prescribed medication; instead they should seek a consultation with their doctor if they are concerned. Out of 1,216 women, the overall ...

Baboons, infants show similar gesturing behavior, suggesting shared communication systems

2012-03-22

Both human infants and baboons have a stronger preference for using their right hand to gesture than for a simple grasping task, supporting the hypothesis that language development, which is lateralized in the left part of the human brain, is based on a common gestural communication system. The results are reported in the Mar. 21 issue of the open access journal PLoS ONE. The researchers, led by Helene Meunier of the University of Strasbourg in France, found that hand preference of both infants and baboons for grasping tasks depended on the location of the object, but ...

Jury Awards $8.5 Million to Family of Girl Born With Brain Damage

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES: