Illinois Personal Injury Lawyer Blog

A Tragedy Almost Too Large to Imagine: 1.7 Million Children Die Every Year From Pollution

May 23, 2017 | Shawn Collins

A recent study by the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that, every year, some 1.7 million children worldwide die because their air and water are too polluted. The world they live in is killing them.

Note to President Trump and EPA chief Scott Pruitt, as they rush head-long into dismantling the environmental protections that have historically separated the US from the rest of the world when it comes to protecting children: Children will be the victims are what you are doing. You will be sentencing children to die, in the name of making America a place where oil and other companies can cheaply and safely pollute.

WHO’s director-general says that “A polluted environment is a deadly one-particularly for young children…… Their developing organs and immune systems, and smaller bodies and airways, make them especially vulnerable to dirty air and water.”

When is Trump White House Disarray a Good Thing? When it Stops his Assault on the Environment, That’s When.

May 22, 2017 | Shawn Collins

President Trump and his administration have been walloped in recent weeks with revelations that Trump tried repeatedly to get FBI Director Comey to shut down the investigation into possible collusion between Trump’s campaign and the Russians, ultimately firing Comey when he wouldn’t agree to stand down as the President insisted. This was followed swiftly by news reports that Trump gave away highly-classified national security secrets during a bizarre, Russian-media-only Oval Office meeting between Trump and the Russians’ most notorious spies, which featured Russian photos of the President grinning like an idiot with his guests, just minutes before giving them our precious secrets. Then came the reports that the President had appointed the now-disgraced Michael Flynn to be his National Security Advisor, despite knowing that Flynn was then under investigation for a relationship with a foreign government. Finally (for the moment, at least), the Justice Department appointed an honest-and-tough-as-the-day-is-long special and independent counsel, Robert Mueller, to take over the investigation into Trump and the Russians, because the public did not trust Trump to quit interfering with the investigations that had been started.

By all accounts, these events–mostly the result of the President’s determination to do and say stupid and possibly illegal things–have flummoxed Trump and the White House into a self-protective crouch, able to pay attention to little else but trying to explain the latest revelation. Reports describe the President as furious over all of this, raging at his aides whom he falsely blames for his own recklessness, and even at the White House TV, whose programming shows that even the Trump-friendly outlets are running out of ways to try to protect the President from himself.

As a result of all of this, the President has been too distracted to devote any attention to his and EPA chief Scott Pruitt’s plan to dismantle the EPA, and allow Pruitt’s many oil company friends, and other corporate polluters, to resume their pillaging of the environment. Just weeks ago, Trump and Pruitt fired many respected EPA scientists who had devoted themselves to saving lives and loudly proposed to brutally slash EPA’s budget for health-protection; allow previously banned toxic chemicals to once again be used throughout the country; reverse the country’s commitment to clean up contaminated waterways and transform the US from the world’s leader in combatting climate change to a laughingstock climate change “denier”.

Maybe Having To Pay $553 Million Will Make Them Think Twice……

May 20, 2017 | Shawn Collins

Heard about the exploding Takata airbags installed in many cars? Upon impact, these airbags explode with such force that they propel metallic shrapnel into the car, and, tragically in some instances, into the car’s driver or passenger. So far, worldwide, 16 people have died and 180 more have been injured.

This, of course, led to multiple lawsuits against car manufacturers and others, seeking compensation for victims, and to provide for the removal of millions of Takata airbags and installation of safe bags.

Today, four car manufacturers–Toyota, Subaru, Mazda, and BMW–agreed to pay a total of $553 to settle the lawsuits that had been filed against them. $553 MILLION. It’s an enormous amount of money, of course.

Pruitt is a Coward: He’ll Only Talk to Friendly Media

May 19, 2017 | Shawn Collins

After having been rightly scorched for his stupidly false recent public statement that humankind’s behavior may not be a major contributor to global warming, EPA chief and oil industry hack Scott Pruitt has taken to discussing his views almost exclusively with media he trusts to lob him only friendly, softball questions. Mostly, that means Fox News.

This is no knock on Fox News or the people who watch it. Fox News has the First Amendment right to broadcast as it sees fit, and its viewers similarly have the First Amendment right to watch whatever they wish.

But it is most definitely a knock on Pruitt. As the head of a federal agency established to protect public health (EPA), Pruitt has intentionally devoted his tenure to gutting the agency altogether, abolishing its sacred mission in favor of letting corporate polluters savage the environment and human health. For example, besides embracing the idiot “science” of climate change “hoaxers”, Pruitt has also recommended a huge (30+%) whacking of the EPA’s budget–greater than for any other federal agency; cut programs intended to clean up dangerously contaminated sites and waterways; reversed without explanation EPA’s finding that a herbicide was dangerous to young children and should be taken off the market; stripped the EPA’s website of important scientific notifications to American citizens; and fired many of the scientists on the agency’s Advisory Board–just to punctuate the message that the Trump/Pruitt EPA is hostile to legitimate science.

Which Chemicals are Most Likely to Contaminate Groundwater?

May 19, 2017 | Shawn Collins

The great majority of families in the rural United States, and many other families, besides, depend on water coming directly from the ground for their everyday living needs. The groundwater also furnishes an emergency supply of clean water all over the country, in the event of contamination of the public water supply by, for example, a catastrophic accident or terrorist attack. So all of us should care about keeping the groundwater clean and safe for human use.

Perhaps the greatest threat to the purity of our groundwater is industrial pollution–for example, factories that dump degreasing chemicals, solvents, plasticizers or volatile organic compounds; gas stations whose underground tanks leak petroleum; landfills whose unlined bottoms provide no barrier against the migration of toxic chemicals directly into the groundwater; and farming operations that saturate the ground with pesticides and herbicides that gradually sink into the groundwater.

The US Geological Survey (USGS) has compiled a list of the chemicals most frequently found to be contaminating the groundwater; the typical sources of those chemicals; and the threats to human health that they present. If your family depends upon the groundwater, please take a good look at this list. https://water.usgs.gov/edu/groundwater-contaminants.html

Are “Fidget Spinners” a Choking Hazard?

May 18, 2017 | Shawn Collins

Is your child mesmerized by the new “fidget spinners” being sold almost everywhere as a “stress reliever”?

I must admit that I don’t understand how these gadgets actually reduce stress, but a report out of Texas warns us that the fidget spinners may also be dangerous. More specifically, they may be a choking hazard for children.

Recently, the mother of 10-year-old Britton noticed her daughter choking in the back seat of the family’s car. Mom’s quick work to help her daughter, plus the efforts of ER docs at the local hospital, identified the culprit as a bearing from the fidget spinner with which Britton had been playing. The bearing had lodged itself in young Britton’s esophagus.

How Many People Got False Assurances from Faulty Lead Testing?

May 18, 2017 | Shawn Collins

The FDA has just issued a warning that certain tests for lead in blood drawn from patients’ veins since 2014 may have falsely assured those patients that they were not suffering from lead contamination when, in fact, they were. The suspect tests were those typically conducted in doctors’ offices, and using a testing method associated with a company known as Magellan Diagnostics.

In this very early stage of the FDA investigation, much is not clear, such as: how many patients are potentially affected, and why the suspect results seem confined to blood drawn from veins, and not via the typical finger-pricking method. Blood is typically drawn by doctors from patients’ veins only to confirm results obtained via finger-pricking which suggested an unacceptably high lead concentration in the blood. This, of course, raises the concern that patients whose doctors drew blood from their veins because of a concerning finger-prick test may actually have had dangerous levels of lead in their blood but received false assurance that there was no problem as a result of the faulty Magellan Diagnostics test.

Plainly, the stakes are very high here: Lead in the human body has been proven to cause a variety of serious health consequences, including developmental delays in young children. There is no safe level of lead in the human body, thus making the accuracy of testing for lead in blood, especially in children, vital.

From Gutting the EPA to His War on Science to Trying to Kill Health Care for Millions to Handing Our Classified Secrets to the Russians: Trump is Not Fit to Be President

May 16, 2017 | Shawn Collins

This blog is dedicated primarily to environmental issues, and so over the last four months, I have blogged with alarm and sadness and sometimes even anger as our new President has done everything within his power to dismantle the EPA–which is the primary federal agency for the protection of public health in this country. Families that I have represented, as well as countless hundreds of thousands of others, are alive and in good health today because the EPA takes seriously its job to warn us as to how dangerous certain industrial chemicals really are; notifies neighborhoods when those chemicals have invaded their air or drinking water, and forces polluters to clean them up.

Trump has also claimed global warming to be a “hoax”, abandoning our role as natural leaders on this important issue, and suddenly consigning the US to the status of a third world back-bencher on the issue perhaps most threatening to the future of mankind. He has appointed to head the EPA a dedicated stooge for the world’s most aggressive polluters (Scott Pruitt), who has joined Trump in discrediting and even firing scientists working for the federal government who have devoted their professional lives to making us all safer.

There has been an almost casual cruelty to Trump’s having done all of this, and so quickly, without even a glancing consideration afforded the millions of Americans–children, first among them–whose health and futures are now endangered because of these blindingly ill-advised actions.

EPA Fires Scientists; Will Replace Them With Lobbyists for Polluters

May 9, 2017 | Shawn Collins

The other shoe is dropping. We learned last week that EPA chief Scott Pruitt was firing his agency’s scientists—the ones who review scientific evidence and determine whether, for example, humans can tolerate less contamination in their drinking water than previously thought, or certain pesticides do damage to children’s developing brains, and therefore should be off the market. We just learned this week that he will likely replace these scientists not with other scientists who are looking out for the people whom the agency is charged with protecting, but instead with so-called “representatives” of the industries the agency is supposed to be watching and regulating and punishing, where necessary, for polluting.

In other words, Pruitt will be trading scientists for corporate lobbyists. He will be transforming the EPA from the protector of the health of the American people to the protector of the profit of the American polluter. It’s a grotesque disfigurement of one of the most valuable and necessary champions of clean air and water that we have had in our society. It’s startling: the EPA will lose key scientists who believe their job is to protect our health.

So it’s not just that Pruitt disagrees with the scientists who know what it takes to keep people safe; it’s that he has decided that their voices aren’t important enough to listen to. It is no exaggeration to say that this decision will cost people their lives.

How Chemicals Can Hurt Us

May 7, 2017 | Shawn Collins

The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) is a federally funded organization which researches the impact on human health of various chemicals. In short, the ATSDR tells us what makes us sick. Below is a summary of what the ATSDR says about how certain dangerous chemicals threaten our health, and where you are most likely to find them. While most of these chemicals are notoriously found near old industrial sites and landfills, this list highlights other places where they are typically found:

(1) Respiratory System: asbestos, radon, and benzene (and other chemicals) found in old insulation, old batteries, industrial degreasers, car exhaust, and furnace.

(2) Kidney/Bladder: TCE, PCE, mercury, lead, cadmium (and other chemicals) found in old batteries, cigarette smoke, old paint and plumbing, degreasers, paint removers, and dry cleaning solutions.