June 2007 Archives

When 3-year-old Anthony Muniz drowned in a neighbor’s backyard pool here earlier this month, the tragedy was particularly piercing: Little Anthony had been named for his mother’s teenage brother, who died in his family’s pool years ago.

The fence that Anthony climbed over after slipping out of his Long Island home on June 6 was four feet tall, as required by the town where he lived, Brookhaven. An hour’s drive west, the fence would have had to be five feet in the town of Hempstead and six feet in North Hempstead. And the pool he drowned in, built about 30 years ago, was exempt from a new New York state law that requires alarms, but only for new or renovated pools.

The widow of a leukemia victim failed to persuade the Supreme Court Monday to consider allowing her to sue oil companies over her husband's exposure to a toxic chemical, a case her lawyer calls a legal "Catch 22" in Alabama.

The justices without comment declined to take up the case of Martha Jane Cline, who is trying to hold the companies accountable for her late husband's health problems. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected the case June 4.

Officials from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration say they have dramatically boosted inspections of companies that harvest cadaver body parts for transplant, acknowledging weaknesses in government oversight of the multibillion-dollar human tissue industry that last year was rocked by scandal.

The FDA claims the inspections turned up no serious problems. But an internal task force report urges the agency to establish a method for tracking body parts from cadaver to transplant patient as well as other problems, but operators of accredited tissue banks and others familiar with the industry say the report doesn't go far enough to clean up the problem.