Novel cancer vaccine holds promise against ovarian cancer, mesothelioma

A novel approach to cancer immunotherapy -- strategies designed to induce the immune system to attack cancer cells -- may provide a new and cost-effective weapon against some of the most deadly tumors, including ovarian cancer and mesothelioma. Investigators from the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Vaccine and Immunotherapy Center report in the Journal of Hematology & Oncology that a protein engineered to combine a molecule targeting a tumor-cell-surface antigen with another protein that stimulates several immune functions prolonged survival in animal models of both tumors. "Some approaches to creating cancer vaccines begin by extracting a patient's own immune cells, priming them with tumor antigens and returning them to the patient, a process that is complex and expensive," says Mark Poznansky, MD, PhD, director of the MGH Vaccine and Immunotherapy Center and senior author of the report. "Our study describes a very practical, potentially broadly applicable and low-cost approach that could be used by oncologists everywhere, not just in facilities able to harvest and handle patient's cells." The MGH team's vaccine stimulates the patient's own dendritic cells, a type of immune cell that monitors an organism's internal environment for the presence of viruses or bacteria, ingests and digests pathogens encountered, and displays antigens from those pathogens on their surface to direct the activity of other immune cells. As noted...

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New York’s Paid Sick Leave Law Quietly Takes Effect

Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from mobile.nytimes.com

Shiv Puri, left, training a new employee at the Bombay Sandwich Company. The employees there will receive paid sick leave for the first time. Share Shiv Puri gathered his employees together after the lunchtime rush last week to deliver the big news: This year, the cook and kitchen staff at the Bombay Sandwich Company on West 27th Street will receive paid sick leave for the very first time. “It’s a full week,” Mr. Puri explained as he handed out a fact sheet describing New York City’s first paid sick leave law. “That includes whether you’re caring for yourself or a member of your family.” His eight employees were thrilled. No surprise there. But Mr. Puri, a new business owner, was feeling pretty good, too, after weeks of worrying and calculating the cost of the new law. “It’s the law and it’s the right thing to do,” he said. “It won’t bust the bank. It won’t put us in jeopardy.” The law went into effect on April 1. And despite the naysayers and the critics, the skies didn’t fall. Instead, without hoopla or hullabaloo, the city quietly became the largest in the nation to ensure that a vast majority of workers wouldn’t lose their jobs or a portion of their paychecks if they or their close relatives got sick. For Mayor Bill de Blasio, who significantly expanded the law’s reach when he took office in January, it is a notable and welcome victory. He has been battered and bruised...

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Good To Be a CA Carrier

Today's post was shared by WorkCompCentral and comes from daviddepaolo.blogspot.com

Life's not too bad right now if you're an insurance company writing workers' compensation in California, at least on the aggregate according to the most recent report issued by the Workers' Compensation Insurance Rating Bureau. With a preliminary accident year combined ratio for 2013 of 113, this is the lowest since a 96 was reported in 2007 and about 20% lower than the period between 2009 and 2011 when they averaged about 141%. The combined ratio is no doubt helped by the biggest premium intake increase in years, with the WCIRB projecting gross industry premiums of $14.8 billion, up 18.4% from last year's $12.5 billion (net written premium, which excludes credits, dividends and other deferrals was up 12% from $9.2 billion in 2012 to $10.9 billion in 2013). The loss ratio of 70 for 2013 is also the lowest since 2007. Total ultimate losses and allocated loss-adjustment expenses of $12.5 billion for the accident year 2013 resulted in an ultimate accident year loss and ALAE ratio of 86.5% for accident year 2013, lower than it’s been in each of the past four accident years. What's going on here? I thought that the California workers' compensation market was moribund into the annals of financial disaster. The number crunchers at the WCIRB will have some more educated guesses than me, but there are a couple of factors that likely are at play. For one thing we are still in an economic recovery, and because California's economy is so big it takes a bit more time to spool up and get...

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Toyota to Recall 6.58 Million Vehicles

Today's post was shared by The New York Times and comes from www.nytimes.com

TOKYO — Toyota Motor will recall 6.58 million vehicles globally to fix faults in the steering and seats, a company draft news release showed Wednesday, in one of the largest recalls in the global auto industry. Toyota, the world’s biggest automaker, is recalling certain Yaris, Urban Cruiser, RAV4 and Hilux models after identifying faults in the steering column, wiring harnesses and seat railings of 1,058 vehicles. The Yaris is also sold as the Vitz, and the Urban Cruiser under the Scion brand as the xA. The recall tally was preliminary and subject to review until a formal announcement in Japan later Wednesday, a Toyota representative said. The recall covers models of the Yaris subcompact and Urban Cruiser SUVs assembled between January 2005 and August 2010 as well as RAV4 sport utility vehicles and Hilux compact pickup trucks made between June 2004 and December 2010, Toyota said in the release. It said that 825,000 of the affected vehicles were in Europe and that it was not aware of any accidents related to the faults. It was not immediately clear whether the faults resulted from design or manufacturing issues.

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Political Ties of Top Billers for Medicare

Photo MIAMI — Two Florida doctors who received the nation’s highest Medicare reimbursements in 2012 are both major contributors to Democratic Party causes, and they have turned to the political system in recent years to defend themselves against suspicions that they may have submitted fraudulent or excessive charges to the federal government. The pattern of large Medicare payments and six-figure political donations shows up among several of the doctors whose payment records were released for the first time this week by the Department of Health and Human Services. For years, the department refused to make the data public, and finally did so only after being sued by The Wall Street Journal. Topping the list is Dr. Salomon E. Melgen, 59, an ophthalmologist from North Palm Beach, Fla., who received $21 million in Medicare reimbursements in 2012 alone. The doctor billed a bulk of his reimbursements for Lucentis, a medication used to treat macular degeneration made by a company that pays generous rebates to its doctors. Dr. Melgen’s firm donated more than $700,000 to Majority PAC, a super PAC run by former aides to the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada. The super PAC then spent $600,000 to help re-elect Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, who is a close friend of Dr. Melgen’s. Last year, Mr. Menendez himself became a target of investigation after the senator intervened on behalf of Dr. Melgen with federal officials...

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Obama signs executive orders on pay transparency for federal contractors

President Obama and congressional Democrats launched a coordinated effort today to draw attention to women’s wages. Republicans on Capitol Hill said the push had little to do with policy and everything to do with politics. Thank you, everybody. Women in the work force, and how much they earn, were the focus at the White House on this Equal Pay Day. And it’s nice to have a day. But it’s even better to have equal pay. (CHEERING AND APPLAUSE) The president was joined by advocates, including Lilly Ledbetter, famous for her lawsuit that led to pay equity legislation, the first bill Mr. Obama signed after taking office. Today, he took two executive actions aimed at federal contractors. One bars companies from retaliating against workers who discuss their pay with each other. The other requires compensation data broken down by race and gender. Census data shows women make 77 percent of what men make, and Equal Pay Day marks the date when the average woman’s earnings finally equal a man’s total earnings for the previous year. The president challenged Republicans to support a Senate bill that would make it easier for workers to sue over pay discrimination. PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: If Republicans in Congress want to prove me wrong, if they want to show that they in fact do care about women being paid the same as men, then show me. In the Senate, Democrats, led by Maryland’s Barbara Mikulski, joined in trying to ratchet up the pressure. SEN. BARBARA...

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Pictures say a thousand words: OSHA Silica Hearings week #3

The photos rolled across the screen. Photos of  construction workers tuck-pointing the cement grout on a building, sawing brick, jack hammering a sidewalk, sanding drywall. Each photo, showing workers in clouds of dust, illustrated the multitude of ways they are exposed, and why they are at risk of silica-related diseases.   The scrolling photo exhibit was the backdrop for testimony provided by representatives of the Laborers’ Health and Safety Fund of North America (LHSFNA) on the final day of OSHA’s public hearing on its proposed silica regulation. The LHSFNA is a joint labor-management trust fund affiliated with the Laborers’ International Union of North America. The fund was created 26 years ago to help signatory contractors improve health and safety practices at their construction sites. Associate director of the LHSFN, Walter Jones, offered his organization’s reaction to testimony provided by other witnesses in the previous 14 days of the proceedings. Specifically, he commented on the recommendations that OSHA revise its proposal to simply require employers to provide respirators to workers, rather than expecting them to control silica dust at its source. Jones remarked: “The proposal is a technology -forcing standard without which we would be stuck listening to the flat-earthers tell us that the hierarchy of controls is outdated and the future of worker health is with respirators.” “Our brothers and sisters on the...

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Sliver of Medicare Doctors Get Big Share of Payouts

Photo A tiny fraction of the 880,000 doctors and other health care providers who take Medicare accounted for nearly a quarter of the roughly $77 billion paid out to them under the federal program, receiving millions of dollars each in some cases in a single year, according to the most detailed data ever released in Medicare’s nearly 50-year history. In 2012, 100 doctors received a total of $610 million, ranging from a Florida ophthalmologist who was paid $21 million by Medicare to dozens of doctors, eye and cancer specialists chief among them, who received more than $4 million each that year. While more money by far is spent for routine office visits than any other single expenditure, one of the most heavily reimbursed procedures — costing a total of $1 billion for 143,000 patients — is for a single treatment for an eye disorder common in the elderly. The Medicare data — all for 2012 and the subject of an intense legal battle — provides an unprecedented look at the practice of medicine across the country, shedding fresh light on the treatment decisions physicians and other practitioners make every day. It will also provide consumers with an ability to compare doctors and treatments in a way they have never had until now. Fraud investigators, health insurance plans, researchers and others will spend weeks poring over the information about how many tests were ordered and procedures performed for every provider who received Medicare...

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Data trove shows U.S. doctors reap millions from Medicare

A patient waits in the hallway for a room to open up inside the emergency room at Ben Taub General Hospital in Houston, Texas July 27, 2009. REUTERS/Jessica Rinaldi

NEW YORK (Reuters) - In 2012, an enterprising ophthalmologist in south Florida received $20.8 million in Medicare payments, the highest amount the government health plan for the elderly paid an individual provider that year, according to a preliminary analysis of federal data. A family-practice doctor in Maryland may have received an average of more than $86,000 per patient that year, according to a Reuters review of the data. And a California laboratory apparently received $190 million, the most Medicare paid a single entity in 2012. After decades of litigation and over the strenuous objections of the American Medical Association, the leading U.S. doctors group, the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) on Wednesday made public for the first time how much Medicare pays individual doctors. The massive data release, totaling nearly 10 million lines, also includes which medical services each of more than 880,000 physicians and other healthcare providers nationwide billed Medicare for in 2012. "While the data are not perfect, this is a major milestone in healthcare transparency," said cancer surgeon Marty Makary of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, whose 2012 book, "Unaccountable," argues for making public more information on doctors and hospitals. In addition to allowing patients to see which doctors perform a particular procedure most frequently - often a proxy for expertise in rare and difficult surgeries such as colon operations - the...

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Voices Emerging Against a Union

Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from www.nytimes.com

EVANSTON, Ill. — Northwestern’s football coach, Pat Fitzgerald, has urged players to vote no in a secret ballot union election scheduled for later this month, he said Saturday. The election, the first of its kind in college sports, was ordered last month by Peter Ohr, a regional director of the National Labor Relations Board, when he ruled that Northwestern’s scholarship football players were employees and eligible to collectively bargain with the university over issues like expanded medical care and practice schedules. “I believe it’s in their best interest to vote no,” Fitzgerald said after practice. Fitzgerald first addressed Northwestern players about the decision in a team meeting Wednesday. He also sent a letter to their parents detailing his position. He spoke about the N.L.R.B. ruling publicly for the first time Saturday. “I just do not believe we need a third party between our players and our coaches, staff and administrators,” said Fitzgerald, a former Northwestern linebacker now in his eighth year as the coach. “Whatever they need, we’ll get them.” Fitzgerald testified during last month’s N.L.R.B. hearing against the union effort. After Fitzgerald’s speech to the team last week, the players held their own meeting. Chance Carter, a senior defensive tackle who said he was not sure how he would vote, said opinions on both sides were expressed. Several players said Saturday that they were...

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Acclaimed photographer Anja Niedringhaus dies

Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from bigstory.ap.org

Anja Niedringhaus faced down some of the world's greatest dangers and had one of the world's loudest and most infectious laughs. She photographed dying and death, and embraced humanity and life. She gave herself to the subjects of her lens, and gave her talents to the world, with images of wars' unwitting victims in Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia and beyond. Shot to death by an Afghan policeman Friday, Niedringhaus leaves behind a broad body of work — from battlefields to sports fields — that won awards and broke hearts. She trained her camera on children caught between the front lines, yet who still found a place to play. She singled out soldiers amid their armies as they confronted death, injuries and attacks. Two days before her death, she made potatoes and sausage in Kabul for veteran AP correspondent Kathy Gannon, who was wounded in the attack that killed Niedringhaus, and photographer Muhammed Muheisen. "I was so concerned about her safety. And she was like, 'Momo, this is what I'm meant to do. I'm happy to go,'" Muheisen recalled. And then they talked, and argued. Mostly, they laughed. Niedringhaus, 48, started her career as a freelance photographer for a local newspaper in her hometown in Hoexter, Germany, at the age of 16. Her coverage of the fall of the Berlin Wall led to a staff position with the European Pressphoto Agency in 1990. Based in Frankfurt, Sarajevo and Moscow, she spent much of her time covering the brutal conflict in the former...

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Evenflo recalls 1.3 million child seat buckles

Today's post was shared by FairWarning and comes from www.usatoday.com

Evenflo Company is voluntarily recalling more than 1.3 million child safety seat buckles due to the risk children could not be removed quickly in an emergency. The National Highway Transportation and Safety Administration said Friday that the recall includes buckles used in a number of children's convertible and booster seat models manufactured between 2011 and 2014. Not all seats made during that time are included. The recall includes some of Evenflo's Momentum, Chase, Maestro, Symphony, Snugli, Titan, SureRide and SecureKid models. The affected seats have model number prefixes of 306, 308, 310, 329, 345, 346, 371 or 385. The buckle may become stuck in a latched position, making it difficult to remove a child from the seat. This could prove critical to a child's safety in the case of an emergency. Evenflo will alert registered owners this month and provide replacement buckles and instructions for installation. The company said on its website that the harness crotch buckle may become resistant to unlatching over time, due to exposure to food, drink and other common contaminants. It said there is no risk if the buckle is functioning normally. Evenflo, based in Piqua, Ohio, has received no reports of injuries to children in connection with the recalled buckles. NHTSA began investigating several models of Evenflo seats in January. Regulators said they are still investigating the safety of one of Evenflo's rear-facing infant seats. It's one of several recent recalls involving...

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Billions From Anadarko Settlement Come After Decades of Contamination

Today's post was shared by FairWarning and comes from online.wsj.com

Radioactive dirt and rocks from Arizona uranium mines, such as this one in 1953, were used to build homes. For 75 years, a factory in Columbus, Miss., churned out railroad ties treated with chemicals to resist weather and bugs. Even before Kerr-McGee Chemical closed the plant in 2003, the community in northeast Mississippi knew that its soil and water had been tainted with creosote, a toxic tar. But today, cleanup has scarcely begun. No one is sure how bad the contamination is or how much it will cost to clean up the 90-acre facility and the houses around it. Similar questions haunt many of the contamination sites covered by the reached last week between the federal government and Corp. , which bought some of Kerr-McGee's operations in 2006. In Nevada, for example, chemicals from making bombs and rocket fuel contaminated drinking water. And in Arizona, radioactive rock from a uranium mine was used to build homes. The record environmental deal will divide upward of $4.5 billion among more than 2,700 sites across the country, many of which have been languishing during litigation over who would pay for cleanup. The rest of the settlement will pay claims by people who got sick from the pollution. "We felt that remediation moneys will be sufficient, even with some cushion for the unknown," said John Hueston, a lawyer for the plaintiffs. "I don't think there's going to be a lot of money collectively left over." It would cost up to $1.7 billion...

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EPA Begins Effort to Reduce Children’s Exposure to Lead Paint in New Haven, Conn. Area

Today's post was shared by US EPA News and comes from yosemite.epa.gov

Release Date: 04/07/2014 BOSTON – In an effort to improve compliance with laws that protect children from lead paint poisoning, EPA is sending letters to approximately 200 home renovation and painting contractors, property management companies and landlords in and around New Haven, Conn. announcing a compliance assistance and enforcement initiative. The EPA letter outlines steps EPA is taking to increase compliance on the part of these entities with the federal lead-based paint Renovation, Repair and Painting (RRP) Rule under the Toxic Substances Control Act. EPA’s RRP Rule, which became effective in April 2010, is designed to prevent children’s exposure to lead-based paint and/or lead-based paint hazards resulting from renovation, repair and repainting projects in residences, schools and other buildings where children are likely to be. This Rule requires individual renovators and firms performing renovations to be trained and certified so that they follow lead safe work practices during renovations of pre-1978 housing and child-occupied facilities in order to protect children from lead poisoning. The letter EPA is sending to New Haven-area contractors, landlords and property management companies invites these entities to an information session at the New Haven Health Department office, 54 Meadow Street, New Haven, on April 16, 2014 from 3 to 6 pm where EPA will provide an overview of the RRP Rule requirements, and introduce an expedited settlement...

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Release of Medicare doctor payments shows some huge payouts

Medicare doctor payments revealed

Ending decades of secrecy, Medicare is showing what the giant healthcare program for seniors pays individual doctors, and the figures reveal that more than a dozen physicians received in excess of $10 million each in 2012. The Obama administration is releasing a detailed account Wednesday of $77 billion in government payouts to more than 880,000 healthcare providers nationwide that year. The release of payment records involving doctors has been legally blocked since 1979, but recent court rulings removed those obstacles. No personal information on patients is disclosed. The two highest-paid doctors listed in the Medicare data are already under government review because of suspected improper billing. They include an ophthalmologist in the retiree haven of West Palm Beach, Fla., who topped the list by taking in more than $26 million to treat fewer than 900 patients. That is 61 times the average Medicare payout of $430,000 for an ophthalmologist. A Florida cardiologist received $23 million in Medicare payments in 2012, nearly 80 times the average amount for that specialty. One California doctor was in the top 10 nationwide: a Newport Beach oncologist who was paid $11 million that year. The overwhelming majority of doctors billed the government very modest amounts. Overall, 2% of healthcare providers accounted for 23% of the Medicare fees, the federal data show. Medicare officials said disclosing physician payment data marks an unprecedented opportunity to make the nation's...

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Pressing Obama’s Agenda, Maryland Lawmakers Raise Minimum Wage

Maryland embraced President Obama’s call to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour on Monday, the second state to do since Connecticut acted last month. The Maryland General Assembly voted for the pay raise on the last day of its 2014 regular session, giving Gov. Martin O’Malley a victory on his top priority this year. The governor, in his last year in office, has staked out a consistently liberal record as he weighs running for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination. Mr. O’Malley thanked lawmakers “for giving so many Maryland families the raise they deserve.” The governor also said he would sign a bill passed Monday that decriminalizes possession of small amounts of marijuana. Violators caught with less than 10 grams of the drug would be issued the equivalent of a traffic ticket and would pay a fine rather than face criminal prosecution. Action on the minimum wage has moved to the states with congressional Republicans refusing to act on Mr. Obama’s call to lift the federal minimum wage from $7.25. Eight states and the District of Columbia have raised their base wages in 2013 and 2014 as Democrats seek to use economic inequality as a rallying point in the midterm elections. Also on Monday, Democrats, who control the Minnesota State Legislature, said they reached a deal to lift the minimum wage to $9.50 an hour by 2016 for large employers, from the current rate of $6.15. Gov. Mark Dayton, a Democrat, is seeking re-election. Last month,...

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Sleep Disorder and Schedule Change Cited as Possible Factors in Train Derailment

For the last two and a half years, William Rockefeller worked nights. And on most of those nights, he was operating a Metro-North Railroad train along the Hudson line, the scheduled stops as familiar to him as the exit signs a driver sees day after day along a highway. On Nov. 17, a new schedule went into effect. The next day, Mr. Rockeller began working a morning shift. Less than two weeks later, at 7:19 a.m. on Dec. 1, the train he was operating derailed as it sped around a curve at 82 miles per hour just north of the Spuyten Duyvil station in the Bronx. Immediately after the accident, Mr. Rockefeller had said that he was in a “daze” as the train gained speed, and on Monday, information released by the National Transportation Safety Board offered a possible medical explanation: undiagnosed sleep apnea. As part of the safety board’s investigation, Mr. Rockefeller underwent a sleep study conducted by a board certified sleep medicine physician, who found that he had “high sleep fragmentation,” with breathing problems causing his sleep to be disrupted about 65 times an hour. Such trouble sleeping was the result of “severe obstructive sleep apnea,” according to the report, a condition that had not been diagnosed by either his personal physician or by medical exams that were a mandatory part of his employment. The sleep specialist noted Mr. Rockefeller’s change in schedule and found that “being a shift worker might have...

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FMCSA Orders Immediate Shut-Down of Bus Company Scapadas Magicas

WASHINGTON – The U.S. Department of Transportation's Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) has ordered Scapadas Magicas LLC, a passenger carrier operating in the United States, to immediately cease operations, and declared the carrier to be an imminent hazard to public safety. “Safety is our number one priority, and we will not tolerate unsafe bus companies on our nation’s roads,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. “We will not allow safety to be compromised.” On Feb. 3, 2013, a bus operated by Scapadas Magicas transporting passengers from locations including Tijuana, Mexico on a ski trip to the Southern California area, crashed on a mountain road striking two other vehicles east of San Bernardino. Seven passengers were killed, dozens were injured, and a driver in a separate vehicle was killed. The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the crash, with the assistance of FMCSA and local law enforcement. "After the tragic crash earlier this week, FMCSA investigators quickly inspected this carrier’s other two buses which had been operated on U.S. roads, and immediately shut them down," said FMCSA Administrator Anne S. Ferro. "Today, we've officially blocked the company from conducting future operations in the United States." A post-crash investigation by FMCSA inspectors of Scapadas Magicas’ two other motorcoaches that had been operating in the U.S. found serious mechanical...

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IMR Removed Compromise

The Independent Medical Review process in California was developed to take medical decision making out of the workers' compensation courts so that the judges can spend more time deciding things that they presumably have more expertise on: evidence, disability rates, causation, etc. And as in most things in workers' compensation, on the face of it the IMR process seemed reasonable. Certainly to me it seemed reasonable. The Workers’ Compensation Insurance Rating Bureau in October 2012 projected the IMR process would save $390 million a year by keeping about 5,000 disputes from going before workers’ compensation judges each month. At first the estimates seemed accurate. There were only 870 applications for IMR submitted in the first six months of 2013. But then trouble transpired. The number of requests increased to 4,410 in July when all dates of injury were eligible and then spiked to 15,731 in August. Since then Maximus has received more than 10,000 IMR requests each month. Employers and carriers blame the applicant attorneys for requesting IMR for everything. Applicant attorneys blame employers and carriers for unreasonably denying everything. Physicians seem caught in the middle and just throw up their hands in frustration. The truth is probably that everyone is correct. What the WCIRB failed to estimate is how many medical disputes never made it to workers' compensation judges in the first place because issues were negotiated, compromised and settled. The WCIRB...

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Corporate Conspiracy: Has Anything Really Changed?

Today I was watching the recorded episode of yesterday’s episode of Saturday Night Live (SNL), as I was deeply entrenched in the NCAA Final Four competition last night and missed it live. The “cold opening” was a purportedly laughable sketch about the  testimony of the CEO of General Motors, Mary Barra, on The Hill last week, avoiding questions about the decade long conspiracy to conceal a faulty ignition system in its vehicles.

Actually, I love to multi-task, so I was also reading a summary judgment motion in an asbestos related claim involving a worker who died of mesothelioma, a rare cancer, decades after his initial exposure to asbestos fiber which has been scientifically causally related. Embedded in the allegations of the complaint was a strong argument about the corporate conspiracy of the asbestos industry and its efforts to doctor up scientific studies long ago beginning at the Saranac Laboratories and through subsequent publications.

The players in the asbestos drama were industry leaders such as: Johns-Manville Corporation, Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, The Union Asbestos and Rubber Company and Raybestos Manhattan, and others. Those were household names at my dinner table, including the world renown research-physician, Irving J. Selikoff, MD, when I was growing up. I am a second-generation asbestos litigator.  The plot unfolded even more during my career in litigation arising out of the Passaic NJ facility of Raybestos-Manhattan Inc. and fortuitous discovery of the infamous “Sumner Simpson” papers. Albeit that everyone wants to take credit for the discovery, it is yet another story to told on a later date.

The Doctrine of Corporate Conspiracy continues to pervade American Industry as dollars over human life continue to be an unending and tragic plot. Similar allegations have played out in the: tobacco litigation, breast implant litigation, latex glove litigation, medical device litigation, lead paint industry, medical device and pharmaceutical production litigation, complaints about toxic water pollution by drillers and mining companies, and the list goes on and on.

Corporate lobbying changed direction of workers’ compensation in the mid-1950’s with national amendments embracing silica exposure claims into the system. It was the same forefront of the expansion of dust disease claims such as asbestosis. All intentionally done to avoid corporate liability within the nation’s civil justice system. Fortunately, the Courts balanced the playing field, and expanded benefits for injured workers and their families into a most realistic realm of compensatory and punitive damages. The rationale  for the expansion was based of the then trending theory of corporate conspiracy.

I asked myself this afternoon, what has really changed? This week, ironically, is “National Asbestos Awareness Week,” and has asbestos yet been banned in the US? No. Does the same battle continue today to make the workplace safer while fighting corporations that continue to resist, ignore, delay and deny? I listened again to the testimony of the Congressional hearings in Washington this week. Has anything really changed?

….

Jon L. Gelman of Wayne NJ is the author NJ Workers’ Compensation Law (West-Thompson) and co-author of the national treatise, Modern Workers’ Compensation Law (West-Thompson). For over 4 decades the Law Offices of Jon L Gelman  1.973.696.7900  jon@gelmans.com  have been representing injured workers and their families who have suffered occupational accidents and illnesses.

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N.C.A.A. Planning to Address Benefits for Some of Its Players, Officials Say

ARLINGTON, Tex. — For the last few months, football players at Northwestern have been pushing to be recognized as a union, which they hope will eventually force universities to further limit practice time and to provide them with benefits like better medical coverage. Their efforts have met considerable resistance from the N.C.A.A., which has suggested that an organized labor force would explode the model of collegiate athletics. But some N.C.A.A. leaders now say they are inching closer to changes that would give the athletes at least some of the things they are seeking — which the officials hope will stave off the union effort. At a news conference Sunday, the day before the men’s basketball championship game here, Mark Emmert, the N.C.A.A. president, and a group of the organization’s leaders discussed the overhaul plan, which is being hashed out. The basic idea, they said, is to give autonomy to the five so-called power conferences in college athletics — the Atlantic Coast, Big Ten, Big 12, Pacific-12 and Southeastern Conferences — allowing them to provide additional benefits to their athletes. “There are things that need to get fixed,” said Emmert, whose organization has been defending itself against a series of high-profile lawsuits claiming that it did not adequately address head injuries and that men’s basketball and football players should receive a share of the revenue generated by their sports. The Northwestern...

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