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GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) is paying a $41 million fine for selling contaminated drugs all over the United States.

A GSK plant in Puerto Rico made the drugs  between 2001 and 2004. They include the anti–nausea drug Kytril, the antibiotic ointment Bactroban, the anti-depressant Paxil CR and the diabetes drug Avandamet. The plant where the contaminated drugs were made was closed in 2009.

In some cases, pills of different strengths were put in the same bottle. In others, pills of different types were packaged together.  And in some cases, the medications were simply contaminated. (more…)

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Child safety requires constant vigilance on the part of parents and anyone who takes care of small children. But even those persons can be led astray, as with accident injuries from defective products that claim to be safe for kids. That was the case with a 16-month-old boy who was found strangled to death in his crib by his mother in 2007, with a window shade cord wrapped around his neck.

According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, around 500 young children have died due to such cords since the early ’80s, or about one per month. Clearly, such shades and blinds are potentially deadly products, yet the federal government hasn’t mandated that their manufacturers make them more safe. Instead, it’s let the industry police itself.

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Time magazine reports that a cultural shift toward bemused tolerance of moms’ drinking so they can cope with busy days is circling the drain along with discarded martinis. Indeed, as advanced by books and commercials, the thought of a happily drinking mom has become less liberating than sobering — especially since a big-news tragedy this summer.

That tragedy, of course, was the horrific drunk driving accident near Hawthorne, N.Y. which claimed eight lives, including that of Diane Schuler, a mother who’d reportedly had 10 drinks before hitting the highway with five kids in her car. Her wrong-way collision killed four of them and herself, along with three men in another car.

Time says this sensational story has had a wrenching effect on women whose routines and responsibilities include ferrying kids from place to place. Drinking isn’t as funny or fun now that Schuler’s catastrophe has served as a wakeup call, especially for women who relate to her life.

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Talk about failing to see the forest for the trees. A news report by Houston’s KHOU TV Channel 11 on its website today has the headline “Cell phone fines mean big bucks for some Texas school districts.” The story concerns fines students must pay when they text or otherwise use cell phones in class, which is against school rules.

As the headline and the article’s content make clear, KHOU’s author considers the problem to be this: “Some schools are cashing in.” She goes on to question how the money collected when students break the rules and text in class is administered. Though there’s no evidence given of impropriety, the author’s conspiracy-theory attitude seems to be, “Those mean ol’ sneaky school districts!”

Of course, the real problem here with far broader implications and concerns is this: Too many of today’s students are disengaged from teachers, class, learning and their immediate environment because they are addicted to cell phones, texting and other avenues of needlessly incessant and exceedingly trivial communication.

These same students, when they drive a car or do a job for which others depend on them, are far more likely to continue such addictive behavior, thereby failing at their responsibilities and, in worst cases, killing themselves or someone else by being a distracted driver.

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July 4th weekend is a time to celebrate America’s liberty. Yet our liberties don’t include driving while impaired, a misjudgment which claims almost one third of all traffic deaths yearly, and an even higher 40 per cent of all traffic deaths on the mid-summer holiday.

Alcohol abuse by drivers crosses all geographic and socioeconomic lines. But motorcyclists have the highest proportion of alcohol abuse of any drivers on the road, and thus more motorcyclists die in traffic accidents on Independence Day than on any other day of the year.

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In June, Texas lost an average of one child a day to drowning. That’s 30 of the state’s 60 child drownings for the entire first half of the year, and all in one month — a month when pool activity escalates, and so do kids’ chances of losing their young lives.

The Houston Chronicle reports that this June, in fact, was the state’s deadliest month for child drownings since such tallies were taken starting in 2005. A majority of child drowning victims were toddlers 1 to 4 years old who succumbed in private home swimming pools.

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Enough is enough. Too many children have died when parents or guardians left them unattended in cars. As summer’s heat rises, such neglect, in effect, is a death sentence. Wake up, America, and don’t ever leave small children behind in a hot vehicle, which one emergency physician says is like “leaving your child in a lit oven.”

Besides protecting the child’s life, you may be helping your own. Increasingly, parents are being arrested and charged with such offenses as child abuse, child neglect or child endangerment. The last can be a felony leading to a jail sentence. Was it worth it to leave the child alone while you went inside a store for some cigarettes?

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In ancient times before cell phones, texting and other multi-tasks put safe driving in the back seat for too many people, we were often warned about leaving pets in a locked car on a hot day. But these days, even small children who are already in the back seat can be subjected to such dangerous indifference by distracted drivers who leave them in a car.

Across America, children are dying because parents or guardians who are in too big of a hurry or too much of a multi-tasking fog forget and leave them locked in a car as temperatures climb toward 100 degrees. Such a sad child death happened again Sunday in St. Augustine, Fla. Don’t let it happen on any day to the child for whom you are utterly responsible.

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Again, tragedy has struck down an innocent child — and again, the tragedy was avoidable. Former heavyweight boxing champ Mike Tyson’s 4-year-old daughter has died, a day after strangling on a cord left dangling from a treadmill at her Phoenix, AZ home.

The treadmill wasn’t turned on, but clearly the cord was still dangerous. Normally such cords are clipped at one end to a treadmill user, so if the person falls, the cord will pull out of the machine at the other end and turn it off. In this case, little Exodus Tyson’s weight apparently wasn’t enough to pull out the cord, which instead became a noose.

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