Articles Posted in Infection Malpractice

There is a log of buzz in Maryland about medical malpractice cases against hospitals due to hospital infections, after an article in Maryland’s legal newspaper, The Daily Record, published an article that such lawsuits are on the rise. According to the article:

Last week, a Chicago man settled a medical malpractice case for $10 million against two groups representing doctors that he sued. In 2003, the man, a 33-year-old vice president at one of the country’s largest information technology staffing firms, was doing great. One year earlier, he had been diagnosed with a routine heart valve condition, a murmur and bicuspid heart valve, leaving him at risk of infective endocarditis, a buildup of bacteria around the heart valve

The United States Government has agreed to pay a former Utah family nearly $1 million to settle a medical malpractice case involving failure to treat infection / sepsis. The man was being treated for leukemia at at a Veterans Affairs hospital in 2004 when he developed a severe infection and died. His surviving wife and daughter filed suit under the Federal Tort Claims Act, alleging that the hospital told him to take gas-x instead of going to the emergency room to get antibiotics. He died of sepsis from a low white-blood-cell count.

A Tennessee man has obtained a $1.5 million verdict in a medical malpractice / medical negligence lawsuit against a doctor. The man lost his leg due to an infection after a bypass surgery in the leg. According to the man, “I’m just hoping that I can get the word out (so) that it doesn’t happen to anyone else.”

A Missouri jury awarded $2.58 million this week to a couple in a medical malpractice case where a retiree got a staph infection and lost his right leg, part of his left foot, a kidney and some hearing. The jury than awarded $513,000 to the wife of the man, who quit her job to help care for her husband for the last four years. The jury found the doctor and the hospital liable for causing the man to suffer 15 surgeries, 84 days in hospitals, 137 visits to doctor’s offices, brain damage and having to learn to walk again with a prosthesis.

A $1.25 million settlement has been reached in an Indiana medical malpractice case in which the parents of a deceased eighteen-month-old claimed that a doctor failed to timely diagnose and treat the child’s meningitis by negligently diagnosing a stomach problem. An antibiotic treatment and brain surgery failed to cure the child, and he died. The parents alleged that the doctor should have done a spinal tap and administered antibiotics earlier. A copy of the article regarding the case can be found here.