 |
 |
to fill out a simple form to connect to Personal Injury Lawyers in your area.
|
|
|
|
|
Nelson v. Upadhyaya9/23/2005
phylactically, beginning some hours before delivery, Anthony would not have contracted meningitis, and he would not have come to suffer from ADHD.
Plaintiffs identified Dr. Heinz Eichenwald as an expert witness on pediatric infectious diseases. Shortly before trial an illness made Dr. Eichenwald unavailable to testify. The court permitted plaintiff to identify a substitute expert on pediatric infectious diseases. Plaintiffs named Dr. Roger Barkin as the substitute and arranged for a deposition on the eve of trial. Following the deposition defendants moved to bar Dr. Barkin from testifying in plaintiffs' case in chief because he had reviewed far more material than had Dr. Eichenwald and Dr. Barkin held opinions Dr. Eichenwald had not expressed. The court granted the motion to bar Dr. Barkin's testimony.
Before trial defendants sought permission to use literature published after 1990 to show the standard of care in 1990. They sought to use the later literature to show that the standard of care for women in labor continued to evolve through the 1990s. Defendants admit that by the end of that decade, all qualified physicians knew of the need to treat a woman in labor with appropriate antibiotics if she had a history indicating colonization with GBS. Over plaintiffs' strenuous objection, the court permitted defendants to use literature published after 1990 to establish the 1990 standard of care.
In the opinion of plaintiffs' obstetrics expert, Dr. Varsha deviated from the 1990 standard of care when she failed to administer during labor appropriate antibiotics to combat potential GBS infection. She also violated the standard of care when she failed to tell other doctors, including Dr. Vinod, that Tammy had a GBS infection in the third trimester of her pregnancy.
Defendants showed the expert two publications of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology (ACOG), one from 1992 and the other from 1996. Both publications acknowledged the prevalence of GBS colonization in pregnant women, and they also acknowledged the danger to the infant from exposure to GBS in the birth process. The publications recommended risk factors the obstetrician should consider when deciding whether to administer prophylactic antibiotics to a woman in labor. The factors included preterm labor, premature rupture of the bag of waters, rupture of the bag of waters more than 18 hours before delivery, a sibling with GBS infection, and maternal fever during labor. The 1996 publication added prenatal colonization with GBS as a risk factor.
According to plaintiff's expert, the ACOG standards applied only to women who, unlike Tammy, had not exhibited any symptoms of GBS infection. The expert admitted that ACOG bulletins from 1992 and 1996 nowhere expressly stated that a third-trimester urinary tract infection required administration of prophylactic antibiotics.
Defendants also cross-examined the expert on articles from 1986 and 1987, including one that said, " is a common cause of neonatal sepsis but despite that relationship to neonatal morbidity and mortality, no consensus exists for an approach to prevention." The expert admitted that he knew "there was a controversy" in 1986 concerning the issue. But he explained that even by 1986 "patients would receive antibiotics who were presumptively colonized." Because of Tammy's third-trimester infection, doctors knew that GBS probably colonized Tammy's urinary tract. Dr. Varsha admitted that in 1990 she knew of the probable colonization. A neonatologist explained that in this case there was "invasive disease in the mother with group B strep, and that's one of the persistent risk factors that there wasn't any controversy about."
Page 1 2 3 4 5 6 Illinois Personal Injury Attorneys
Personal Injury Lawyers
|
| |
to fill out a simple form to connect to Personal Injury Lawyers in your area.
|
|