Life Sciences Legal Update : Life Sciences Lawyers & Attorneys : Reed Smith Law Firm : Healthcare, Food and Drug Law, Biotechnology, Privacy, Product Liability

On March 14, 2008, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (“FDA”) received approval from the U.S. State Department to place eight full-time, permanent FDA employees at U.S. diplomatic posts in the People’s Republic of China, pending authorization from the Chinese government. The FDA will also be hiring five local Chinese nationals to work with the new FDA staff at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing and the U.S. Consulates General in Shanghai and Guangzhou. The FDA expects to be fully staffed in China within 18 months.

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Calendar year 2008 has begun where 2007 ended, by presenting us with a number of legal developments impacting the provision of outpatient surgical care. Keeping up with such developments is a challenge for those of us whose careers revolve around representing outpatient surgical facilities. Keeping up for those who actually own and/or operate such facilities as part of their practices may simply be impossible.

Accordingly, this post details our discussion of selected recent developments in the outpatient surgery arena to be useful. This alert and others that we will forward do not purport to be exhaustive accounts of legal developments impacting ASCs or physician-owned hospitals nationally. Rather, we have identified developments that we found particularly interesting in that they address common themes or questions that we frequently encounter.

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This post was written by Darren Smith, Julia Dodds, and Claire Hamm.

The UK has an estimated 3,000 deaths per year from mesothelioma, the lung cancer caused by inhalation of asbestos fibres. This rate of incidence shows no signs of slackening, a result of the historic exposure of the UK workforce to asbestos, and is not expected to peak until 2018. With the average award of damages for mesothelioma currently around £150,000 ($300,000), defendants and their insurers are already paying out close to $1 billion a year to settle mesothelioma claims alone; and to this must be added the cost of claims for non-fatal asbestos-related diseases.

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