Author Archive

Takes Lives but can’t Take a Joke? Hey Asbestos, You got Punked!

May 20th, 2011. By Hunter West

I feel for the town of Asbestos, in Quebec. I really do.

Perhaps you haven’t heard of Asbestos, Quebec—a town of 6,000 located in the Canadian province that is home to the Jeffrey asbestos mine. It used to be the world’s largest asbestos mine until recently. And yes, it’s still active. In fact, the mine remains the town’s largest employer.

You may know that already, if you watched the recent segment of Jon Stewart’s ‘The Daily Show’ that lampooned the mine, and the town. (And if you didn’t, there’s an amateur clip of the segment above.)

There is little doubt that ‘The Daily Show’ was out to make fun of Asbestos, Quebec. How could they not? Asbestos the fiber, in the last several years, has become known as a scourge—the cause of asbestosis, mesothelioma and asbestos cancer. The latency is something like 30 years or more between exposure and certain death.

Asbestos the fiber has been banned in many parts of the world, and is tightly controlled elsewhere. An entire industry has sprung up to facilitate the safe removal of asbestos. The latter could be prohibitively expensive. Perfectly good buildings have been torn down, rather then re-purposed because the costs of asbestos removal were just too great.

For heaven’s sake, there have been examples of family members of asbestos fiber workers meeting their maker just being in close proximity with asbestos (the fiber, not the town). Some wives have died simply washing their husband’s asbestos-laden work clothes.

There is no question that asbestos is bad stuff.

But it is still used. There is still a market for it—such as India, for example. And when the Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Asbestos, Asbestos Mesothelioma, asbestos_mesothelioma
Posted in Asbestos Mesothelioma | 7845No Comments »2011-05-20+16%3A32%3A29Hunter+West

FDA & Post-Market Testing of Hip Devices: Too Little, Too Late

May 16th, 2011. By Hunter West

The requirement by the FDA for post-market testing on metal-on-metal hips is a sign that the federal regulator may be finally coming to its senses over the longstanding invitation to manufacturers to escape the road of rigorous testing for some medical devices.

It’s about bloody time.

The FDA is both a regulatory body and a political body, with the majority of its power reserved for manufacturers of new drugs and new medical devices. To that end the FDA can play hardball and make a manufacturer jump through hoops until the agency is satisfied that a device or drug delivers more benefit than it does risk.

Once a device is on the market however, the FDA has pretty weak powers. A letter, such as the one sent to about 20 manufacturers of metal-on-metal hips on Friday, is about the extent of the FDA’s post-market authority.

Basically, the FDA has ordered all artificial hip manufacturers to conduct post-market testing of their devices, in light of the failure rate of various artificial hips.

However, had this testing been conducted in the first place, hundreds if not thousands of patients with problematic hips would have been spared the pain and frustration that comes with having an allegedly defective hip placed inside your body—at great expense—only to have it fail within five years of an expected 15 to 20-year lifespan.

A failed artificial hip needs, in most cases, to be replaced—along with more pain, more downtime, and more money.

At least it can be replaced…

Witness the situation over heart leads a few years ago. One brand of defibrillator lead, a wire Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Defective hip replacement, FDA, hip implant, hip surgery, metal-on-metal hip
Posted in Drugs/Medical | 7813No Comments »2011-05-16+20%3A19%3A24Hunter+West

Pissed off Canadian Tells Sony ‘Game On’ with PlayStation Class Action

May 5th, 2011. By Hunter West

Natasha Maksimovic is mad as hell and she deserves to be.

Natasha is the 21-year-old resident of Mississauga, a city in the Greater Toronto corridor in Canada, serving as the lead plaintiff of a proposed class action lawsuit against Sony over the potential theft of personal information.

There are some 77 million people worldwide who may agree with her.

At issue is personal information belonging to gamers and users of Sony PlayStation and Oriocity systems. Such information includes, but may not be limited to names, street addresses, birthdates, passwords, security answers, logins, billing information, and so on.

Sony has reportedly apologized for the breach and offered a 30, or 60-day free membership for users on its PlayStation network.

Maksimovic says that’s not good enough. “If you can’t trust a huge multi-national corporation like Sony to protect your private information, who can you trust?” she asks.

Exactly.

It appears that Sony has done two things wrong. First, the electronics juggernaut appears to have dropped the ball in protecting its system sufficiently from hackers who constantly cruise the Internet looking for portals to plunder. Second, they appear to have taken the potential theft of 77 million sets of personal information worldwide—about a million in Canada—somewhat lightly.

The lawsuit alleges that Sony was aware of the breach, but failed to advise clients in a Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: hackers, internet security, Natasha Maksimovic, Oriocity, Play Station, Privacy, Sony, Sony Class Action, Sony PlayStation
Posted in Class Action, Internet/E-commerce | 7743No Comments »2011-05-05+15%3A27%3A49Hunter+West

Jimmy Stewart Plane Crash Movie too Close to Reality 60 Years Later

April 28th, 2011. By Hunter West

The grounding of a Southwest Airlines 737 earlier this month due to a five-foot tear in the upper fuselage while the plane was in the air reminded me of a favorite old movie starring James Stewart.

‘No Highway in the Sky,’ a British disaster film made in 1951, follows the heroics and eccentricities of a professor and an expert in aviation who is commissioned to investigate the crash of a commercial airliner. Factoring in the age of the plane and the number of hours flown—not to mention the natural propensity of metal to weaken when under constant stress and subject to vibration—Stewart’s character theorizes that the plane crashed because the tail fell off due to metal fatigue.

He proceeds to rig a life-sized experiment in his lab, subjecting the tail section of an actual aircraft to vibrations and various in-flight sources of stress in an effort to replicate the actual crash, and to test his theory.

His colleagues think he is daft. But the movie—based on a novel—did contain some elements of truth.

That was borne out in the comments of a former North Carolina State University prof and expert in materials science, who says cracks in the bodies of commercial airliners are normal, and can be expected.

“It can happen with everyday things,” Charles Manning said in comments published April 4^th on WRAL.com. “Take a paper clip and bend it back and forth. It’s going to break,” Manning said.

Of course, there are the engine vibrations—harkening back to that old Jimmy Stewart movie. But more precisely, Manning told WRAL that the act of pressurizing the cabin, allowing passengers and crew to breathe, stretches the metal skin in, and out with each pressurization. Over time, the metal wears down and cracks.

Fatigue cracks are small, he said—barely perceptible with a microscope when they first occur. It’s when they become more severe and can be seen by the naked eye, that they can potentially become a problem and are then subject to regular inspections.

Manning knows his stuff. For the past 30 years, he has headed Accident Reconstruction Analysis Inc., an engineering consulting firm that performs failure analysis and accident reconstruction. Before that, he was a materials science professor at North Carolina State, and he also headed NASA’s Langley Advanced Materials Research Program. He reminds travelers that planes are inspected regularly, and not to worry…

Not to worry?

Tell that to the frightened passengers on board the Southwest airliner when the five-foot gash blew open, suddenly de-pressurizing the plane. Yes, the aircraft landed safely and there was no loss of life or injury beyond sheer terror. However, the sudden de-pressurization of a cabin can serve as a vacuum, sucking anything out with the rapidly escaping air pressure—like papers, handbags…and if the breach happens to occur adjacent to a child who isn’t strapped in…

Well, you know the rest.

In the movie, Jimmy Stewart’s character forgot to provide for temperature in his calculations. The tail DID fall off in his lab, but a bit beyond when he said it would. Sadly, during the interim, he had caused damage to a similar plane on an attempt to prevent it from taking off (he was worried about the tail), and the daft professor was banished and dismissed as a crackpot.

Until, that is, the tail in his lab experienced fatal metal fatigue, cracked, separated and crashed to the floor.

Until, that is, the actual plane he tried to keep on the ground was repaired and sent up for a test flight without passengers. When it landed, the tail fell off…

It was just a movie, right?

Fact: Three years after the film’s release, there were two fatal crashes involving the world’s first passenger jet, the de Havilland Comet. Investigators determined that metal fatigue was the most likely cause of both accidents, although other sources point to a design flaw. No the tails didn’t fall off, but the fuselage gave way.

That was in 1954.

Then there was the infamous 1988 incident where cracks led to a massive breach in the roof and fuselage of an Aloha Airlines flight. Flight attendant C.B. Lansing was sucked out due to the rapid depressurization, and she fell to her death.

Manning assures that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) keeps the airlines on a tight maintenance schedule, including the testing by manufacturers of aircraft in an effort to gauge when, and where metal is likely to experience fatigue.

Did they miss something with the Southwest flight?

“I think planes are maintained as well as you can, and if the FAA sees that people are not doing it, they get after them,” Manning said.

That’s reassuring…

Hey, how about this idea. Figure out the point when metal starts to experience fatigue—and replace the bloody plane.

Oh, but that would be just too expensive, wouldn’t it? Planes cost millions of dollars. Fleets cost billions. We wouldn’t have an airline industry—it would not be economically viable.

Thus to have an airline industry, it appears that planes are required to stay in service as long as they are well maintained.

Complete with cracks.

Yes, I acknowledge those who maintain flying is still safer than driving—especially with so many people abusing their smart phones and GPS devices—or looking at their computerized dashboards–while driving.

That’s why I’m taking the train…

Posted in Accidents, Airlines | 7629No Comments »2011-04-28+13%3A18%3A23Hunter+West

Food Safety Alert: The Problem With Meat Glue

April 21st, 2011. By Hunter West

Oh, you haven’t heard of meat glue? The food industry loves the stuff—and for good reason. Anything that would allow the morphing of a bucket of meat bits, like stewing beef for example, into what looks like a Grade A steak and commands a Grade A price at the counter, is akin to manna from heaven.

To the untrained eye (meaning, you and me), it’s impossible to tell the difference. It looks like a steak. It grills like a steak. It tastes like a steak. But it’s not a steak, but rather chunks of meat that in a previous era would have been sold as stewing beef for a lot less than the kind of price a steak commands. But mix in some meat glue, roll it up and after six hours in the refrigerator, out comes a gelled roll that can be sliced into a series of lovely-looking, boneless steaks.

The potential for fraud is obvious. Beyond the deception, however, why did the European Union ban meat glue last year?

First, the back-story of what meat glue is. In fact, meat glue is actually an enzyme derived from thrombin and fibrogen, which is obtained from the blood plasma of swine and cattle. This is the stuff that causes blood to clot—and it also does a spiffy job, it turns out, of knitting small bits of meat together to appear like more expensive-looking steaks.

Is meat glue harmful? Well, the European Food Safety Authority gave meat glue a positive safety opinion in 2005, only to ban it five years later. And a butcher participating in a story Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: EU, fibrogen, Food Poisoning, meat additive, meat glue, thrombin
Posted in Defective Products, Drugs/Medical, Food Illness | 75402 Comments »2011-04-21+11%3A20%3A54Hunter+West