Recently in Defective Products / Products Liability Category

A gospel singer is suing McDonald's, after she allegedly bit into a piece of glass while eating a chicken sandwich served to her at a McDonald's in New York City.

Jacqueline Simpson is now claiming that her voice is ruined. She complains that she can't sing soprano like she used to, and that her voice has been rendered hoarse and rattly, which it didn't used to be. "I have to make a lot of calls for work, and I have to tell people that I'm not a man," Simpson told the New York Post.

McDonald's is no stranger to lawsuits. So how might this one fare?

About 10 million pounds of snack foods including frozen pizzas, mozzarella bites, Philly cheese steaks, and others have been recalled after reports of an E. coli outbreak. Two dozen people in 15 states have become ill after eating the snacks, according to the FDA.

Rich Products Corporation of Buffalo, New York, is pulling all products produced at a Georgia plant. The recalled products are stamped with "best by" dates from January 1, 2013 to September 29, 2014, reports NBC News.

It's believed 3 million pounds of recalled products are still in the marketplace.

The first Johnson & Johnson DePuy hip implant lawsuit to go to trial has resulted in an $8.3 million jury award for one man's injuries.

This could be the first of many large jury awards, as more than 10,000 similar lawsuits have been filed nationwide, Bloomberg reports. Analysts say that means J&J may end up having to shell out billions of dollars.

The lawsuits allege that J&J's DePuy unit defectively designed its ASR metal hip implants, which caused painful injuries to thousands of recipients. The $8.3 million award will go to one of those hip implant recipients, Loren "Bill" Kransky.

A Massachusetts family has been awarded $63 million from Johnson & Johnson after a young girl suffered severe side effects, including blindness, from taking Children's Motrin.

With interest, the family of Samantha Reckis stands to take in a total of $109 million as the injury happened a decade ago, reports The Associated Press.

At the time of the incident in 2003, Reckis was 7 years old. After she took Children's Motrin to relieve a fever, she suffered a side effect known as toxic epidermal necrolysis and lost 90% of her skin. The drug was also blamed for causing blindness.

Johnson & Johnson faces claims it developed a metal hip replacement that had several design defects. In a major hip replacement lawsuit, a plaintiff (one of 10,000) accuses top-level officials in J&J's DePuy Orthopaedics unit of hiding the defects from doctors and patients.

The gist of this product liability lawsuit is that DePuy created a hip replacement with stability issues and that also leaked toxic debris into patients' bloodstreams. But instead of notifying doctors and patients, the company allegedly kept silent.

The lead/liaison counsel for the California cases, the first to go to trial, alleges that DePuy knew about the risks of its product, but deliberately hid them. The company could potentially face billions of dollars in damages if found liable.

Emergency room visits associated with energy drinks have doubled in the past four years, suggests a study by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

From 2007 to 2011, the government found that the number of ER visits by energy drink users went from 10,000 visits to more than 20,000, reports the Associated Press. And in most of these cases, the individuals hospitalized were teens and young adults.

The study concludes that energy drink consumption is a "rising public health problem" that can cause insomnia, nervousness, headache, fast heartbeat, and seizures. However, the survey did not specify which side effects led to the ER visits.

Can Bushmaster be sued over the deadly Connecticut elementary school shooting?

A Bushmaster rifle was reportedly used in the shootings that claimed 26 lives at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown. A Bushmaster rifle was also used in the Washington, D.C.-area sniper attacks in 2002, after which victims and their families sued the company, Forbes reports. The suit ended in a $2.5 million settlement.

The company may soon find itself involved in another lawsuit tied to the elementary school tragedy. This may be true even though there is a federal law that would seem to bar lawsuits against gunmakers for crimes committed with their products, according to Forbes.

About 220,000 infant travel beds have been recalled following a child's death and reports of others getting trapped.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) announced the recall in cooperation with the travel beds' manufacturer KidCo Inc.

Along with the infant's death, there were reports of nine other children being entrapped or distressed inside KidCo's Pea Pod Travel Crib portable sleep tents, reports the Associated Press.

Bounce house injuries send 30 children to hospital emergency rooms every day, a new study finds. That's nearly 11,000 per year, the Associated Press reports.

If you've been to a child's birthday party recently, you may have seen the ubiquitous inflatable bounce house in the front lawn. Kids can't seem to get enough of them, and parents can't seem to resist renting, or even buying, these dressed-up trampolines.

So to no surprise, researchers found that an increasing number of children are getting hurt by hopping around in bounce houses of all shapes and sizes.

Those tiny 5-Hour Energy drinks may pack a bigger punch than you think: They've been cited in 13 death reports over the past four years, according to the Food and Drug Administration.

In addition, 5-Hour Energy has also been mentioned in 90 filings with the FDA that involved serious injuries such as heart attacks, convulsions, and even an abortion, reports The New York Times.

This is the second time in recent weeks that the FDA has cited a caffeinated energy drink as possibly linked to deaths. Last month, the federal agency said it had received fatality filings that cited Monster Energy drinks.