Illinois Personal Injury Lawyer Blog
Are you aware that certain cars can put you at a significantly higher risk of suffering serious consequences if you are in a car accident? It’s true. The type, make, and model of the vehicle you are driving can have a substantial impact on your level of safety in the event you are in a car crash. And contrary to popular belief, you don’t need to spend a lot of money to drive an extremely safe car. Fortunately, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), has compiled data on which cars had the highest and lowest rates of driver deaths per million registered vehicle years for the period between 2015-2018. Being aware of this information can help you make a safe choice if you are considering purchasing a new car.
The top 5 cars on the list with the highest rates of driver deaths are:
- Ford Fiesta: 141 driver deaths per million registered vehicle years
Keeping children safe and protected from hazards is a top priority for parents. Unfortunately, many toys on the market pose a danger to children. As a result, every three minutes in the U.S., a child is brought to an emergency room with a toy-related injury. Regardless of the severity of the risk they pose–from minor to serious injury or even death–it is unacceptable that dangerous toys are being sold and marketed to children. Playtime should be a safe time for all children. Luckily, there is a non-profit that is solely focused on keeping children safe and educating the public about toy safety. W.A.T.C.H., World Against Toys Causing Harm Inc., releases a yearly list of the most dangerous toys. The toys included on the list this year may pose a choking hazard or cause lacerations, impact injuries, eye injuries, or other injuries, so it is best to avoid them. Below you will find the ten toys that made the list and why W.A.T.C.H. considers them unsafe:
Graco has issued a recall of approximately 51,000 of their infant inclined sleepers because they pose a suffocation risk. While no deaths have occurred with the Graco infant inclined sleepers, there have been a number of infant deaths linked to other, very similar products. The inclined sleepers that are being 
Halloween is a time of year that many people–adults and children alike–look forward to. It’s an exciting time of year with lots of fun things to do, from Halloween parties to haunted houses to trick-or-treating. However, it’s also a dangerous time of year.
We should be able to expect that products that are widely available for purchase are safe to consume but, unfortunately, this is not always the case. When you reach for a can of fizzy, sparkling water the last thing you want is to unknowingly be ingesting toxic chemicals with each sip, but that may be exactly what you are doing. 
The images are everywhere on the news; protesters, exercising their Constitutionally protected right to free speech, fleeing from clouds of tear gas thrown by the police. What we have seen protesters enduring in recent months has been downright inhumane. Setting aside the fact that protesters are being abused by law enforcement for no justifiable reason, the “riot control agents”–often referred to as tear gas–that the police are using on protesters, have been banned from international warfare by the Geneva Protocol since 1925. So why on earth do we still allow tear gas to be used on citizens by the very people who are meant to protect them?
Washing your hands with soap and water is always the best option for keeping your hands clean, but we don’t always have access to soap and water. That’s where hand sanitizer comes in. Hand sanitizers have never been as popular or necessary as they are right now. Unfortunately, the increase in demand for hand sanitizers has led to some dangerous products being on the shelves. There has been a dramatic increase in hand sanitizers containing methanol, also referred to as wood alcohol. Methanol has no place in hand sanitizers given that it can be toxic when absorbed through the skin or ingested. To make matters worse, the methanol found in hand sanitizers is not being labeled as an ingredient on the product itself, meaning we have to be extremely careful about what products we are buying and using during this time.
As if COVID-19 is not bad enough, now there is news that some hand sanitizers being sold to prevent the virus may be hazardous themselves.
Coronavirus put a halt to the world as we know it, and it also put a stop to driving for many of us. We started working from home, getting groceries and meals delivered, avoiding gatherings, and staying home in the evening. With everything closed, there really was no need to drive. Now that states are starting to reopen, however, more people are out and about, and more drivers are getting back on the road. Some of the drivers out there, however, haven’t driven in nearly 4 months! Given that many of us are out of practice, the roads might look a bit like they’re full of 16-year-old kids who just got their driver’s licenses. It’s important that we drive carefully and do whatever we can to make the roads safe for everyone, as we get back into the swing of things. The good news is that there are steps we can take to ensure that our roads are as safe as possible while we shake the rust off of our driving abilities.
As Illinois moves into phase 3 of COVID-19 reopening, traffic is making a big comeback. You may have noticed that the roads are more crowded, the parking lots are a bit fuller, and the expressways feel more like they did in January and February.