Mr. Phillips has served as a manager since 1992. He also currently Co-Chairs the Medical Negligence Committee and the Editorial Committee of the Illinois Trial Lawyers Association.    

Mr. Phillips was also ranked by Avvo.com as highest rated Medical Malpractice, Brain Injury Lawyer, Birth Injury Lawyer , Trucking Accident Lawyer  and Wrong Death Lawyer in Illinois.

Personal Injury lawyers in Illinois - Avvo.com

(AP) — Experimental blood substitutes raised the risk of heart attack and death, yet U.S. regulators allowed human testing to continue despite warning signs, says a scathing new report.The U.S. Food and Drug Administration fell short, the report contends, even as red flags popped up during studies by five biotech companies. Rules barred the agency from releasing company trade secrets, and that kept some information hidden and may have led to unnecessary heart attacks and deaths, wrote the authors, who are government scientists and consumer advocates.

“There shouldn’t be secret science,” said the lead author of the report, Dr. Charles Natanson, of the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center. Safety data need “to be made public expeditiously so science can build on the mistakes” of previous research, he said.

The report, being published online Monday by the Journal of the American Medical Association, is the latest analysis of the risks of blood substitutes, which have been in testing for more than a decade.

It was written by scientists with the NIH Clinical Center and advocates with the watchdog group Public Citizen. The clinical center in Bethesda, Md., seeks to ensure the safe and ethical conduct of clinical research.

A safe replacement for blood would be a breakthrough for medicine and a big money-maker for companies that produce it. It could save lives on battlefields. Unlike ordinary blood, it could, theoretically, be stored for years without refrigeration. It also would work with any blood type and would not carry infections like hepatitis or the AIDS virus.

By the end of 2000, a dozen studies of blood substitutes had been completed. By then, FDA officials would have known enough about cumulative risks to put a halt on further experiments, the JAMA report contends.

But the FDA looked at each product and each use separately — in surgery, in trauma, in stroke patients — rather than pooling the results to get a fuller picture of the risk, Natanson said.

In 2006, after a lawsuit by Public Citizen protesting a closed-door hearing, the FDA halted a test by the Navy, which planned to use a blood substitute on civilian trauma victims. Such tests raised ethical concerns about giving trauma patients an experimental product without their consent.

Dr. Jay Epstein, director of FDA’s office of blood research and review, defended the agency’s decisions about human testing of the products despite risks. The agency has found enough differences among the individual products and their intended uses to allow some studies to proceed, Epstein said Friday in a conference call with reporters.

Currently, there are no approved blood substitutes or clinical studies of them in the United States. However, American companies are testing them on people in South Africa and seven European countries. South Africa has approved one of the products, Hemopure, made by Biopure Corp., based in Cambridge, Mass., for use in anemic surgery patients.

“It is highly unlikely, I’d say impossible, that any of these countries are aware of the risk,” said study co-author Dr. Sidney Wolfe of Public Citizen.

In the new report, researchers analyzed 16 randomized controlled studies of five different blood substitutes. More than 3,700 patients were involved. The studies included elective surgery, trauma and stroke patients.

Researchers found a 30 percent higher risk of death overall for patients who received transfusions using the blood substitutes; 164 of those patients died. Among those who received ordinary blood products or saline transfusions, 123 died.

The risk of heart attack was nearly tripled in the groups receiving blood substitutes. There were 59 heart attacks in that group compared with 16 heart attacks in the group that didn’t get the new products.

Experts speculate that hemoglobin in the blood substitutes scavenges nitric oxide from the blood, causing blood vessels to constrict and sticky platelets to build up. That increases the risk of heart attacks.

The report comes as the besieged FDA reacts to numerous other troubles.

Contaminated blood thinner from China recently highlighted the agency’s shortage of inspectors abroad. In September, an inspector general’s report found the FDA does little to oversee human safety in clinical trials by drug companies.

Last year, new legislation was adopted to give the FDA more power to act when problems emerge with drugs already on the market — action prompted by the furor over the withdrawal of the risky painkiller Vioxx in 2004.

If you feel that you or your loved ones may have been injured by this drug or any other products, please do not hesitate to contact the attorneys at Phillips Law Offices.

Stephen Phillips, who co-chairs the Illinois Trial Lawyers’s Medical Negligence Committee was featured in a recent edition of Chicago Lawyer magazine discussing how Doctors are often intimidated by their peers if they testify in a legal case.

(AP) — Some 62 deaths are now associated with contaminated batches of the blood thinner heparin, triple the previous estimate, the Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday.

That doesn’t mean people are still dying — the latest deaths the FDA knows of occurred in February, the month Baxter International recalled contaminated batches.

But dozens of deaths weren’t reported to the agency when they happened, only later after the tainted blood thinner made headlines.

On Tuesday, the FDA posted a month-by-month mortality count on its Web site, showing a sudden jump in allergic-style fatal reactions actually began last November — possibly signaling the time when the contamination began.

If you feel that you or your loved ones may have been injured by this drug or any other products, please do not hesitate to contact the attorneys at Phillips Law Offices.

Repeat Honorees, Stephen D. Phillips and Charles Hornewer are joined this year by Jill M. Webb.

Terrence M. Quinn has been selected as an Illinois Rising Star. The Illinois Rising Stars are selected from the top 2.5% of up-and-coming Attorneys.

Jill Webb, a partner at Phillips Law Office in the Loop, has handled many dental malpractice cases. She agrees with Baxter’s assessment and believes that more patients would file malpractice claims if they knew how.

“I don’t think consumers are aware they have the ability and right to report problems to the state authorities” at the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation, Webb said. Katie English had no idea she could file such a complaint.

When a patient does initiate a complaint against a dentist, state regulators look into it. If they find evidence of malpractice, a dentist may face a reprimand, fine or probation. His or her license also may be suspended or revoked.

Patients may decide to sue, but this route is more difficult. According to an ADA study, more than half of dental settlements involve less than $10,000. Such an amount often does not cover attorneys’ fees — let alone the costs to patients — leaving little financial incentive to pursue a claim.

Malpractice cases also face stiff opposition in court. Insurance companies have lawyers who defend dental malpractice claims full time. These specialists are so hard to beat that many would-be plaintiffs decide not to sue.

In any case, the onus is on patients to identify problems. Unlike the medical profession, which has a strong tradition of analyzing problems through papers and conferences, many dentists do not discuss errors openly.

“You won’t find a dentist presenting a paper on a mistake,” Baxter said. “They just don’t talk about it.”

Experts interviewed for this story suggested several ways to minimize the chances that you will encounter dental malpractice.

Before seeing a new dentist or undergoing a complex procedure, patients should check the disciplinary record of their practitioners on the Web site of the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation, according to Webb. “You can look up and see that, 10 years prior, his license was suspended for gross misconduct,” Webb said. “That’s all public information.”

These records also will show if your dentist has been charged with any non-medical problems — fraudulent billing, for instance. Webb said that patients should keep in mind that dentists need a separate license to administer an IV, called a “controlled-substance license.” So if your dentist doesn’t have one, no IVs.

Yesterday, Public Justice sent an urgent letter to CBS, which licenses the toy in conjunction with its popular “CSI” series; Planet Toys of New York, the distributor; and key retailers nationwide seeking an immediate meeting to determine how these companies are going to protect children and others from potentially-fatal exposure to asbestos. The letter raises the possibility of an immediate recall, refunds for customers, and a plan for the safe disposal of the asbestos-tainted powder.

The risk here is particularly grave because the asbestos-contaminated toy is already in powder form and, incredibly, the directions call for users to blow on the powder or dust it away, so any asbestos contaminant is almost certain to be inhaled and widely disseminated. When respirable asbestos fibers are inhaled, they reach the deep recesses of the lung where they are deposited permanently. Eventually, these fibers can cause a horrific lung disease, called asbestosis, and may cause deadly cancer, such as mesothelioma and lung cancer. The injuries can manifest several decades after first exposure. There is no established “safe” level of exposure for any asbestos fibers. In particular, mesotheliomas have been reported to occur following seemingly trivial, transient exposures to minuscule amounts of asbestos.

We hope and believe this problem can be resolved without litigation, but we have put the addressees on notice that “ADAO will be forced to take alternative steps” if they do not respond immediately.

To read Public Justice’s letter to CBS, Planet Toys and retailers, click here.To read the ADAO report on the lab test findings, click here.

Jill M. Webb, a partner with Phillips Law Offices in Chicago serves on the Board of Directors of Public Justice. If you feel that you or your loved ones may have been injured by this “toy” or any other products, please do not hesitate to contact the attorneys at Phillips Law Offices.

It is not known if there has been any medical problems with children due to this vaccine, but the company is recalling it to be on the safe side.  HIB is a vaccine that prevents meningitis and pneumonia.  The shots are given at three separate doctor visits starting when the child is two months of age.

The recall involves 10 lots of the HIB vaccine and two lots of a combination of vaccine of HIB and Hepatitis B.

If you suspect that your child may have received this drug please contact your physician immediately or if you feel any harm may have been caused, please do not hesitate to call the attorneys at Phillips Law Offices.