Tag: defects
GM Consumers Complained For Years About Ignitions

GM Consumers Complained For Years About Ignitions

By Greg Gordon, McClatchy Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — Consumers made at least 133 warranty claims with General Motors about defects in the ignitions of its cars from June 2003 to June 2012, while the company continued to deny any defects, congressional investigators have found.

Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman of California released a summary of the findings shortly before GM’s new chief executive, Mary Barra, was due to testify to a House subcommittee Tuesday afternoon about the emerging scandal over the company’s failure to act. The company did not act even while failures of the switch led to crashes that killed 13 people when airbags failed to deploy. In February, GM began issuing recall notices for 2.6 million of those cars — including Chevrolet Cobalts and HHRs, Saturn Ions and Skys, and Pontiac G5s and Solstices — due to the defects.

“To this day, GM has not reported the vast majority of these incidents to (the) National Highway Traffic Administration or revealed them to the public,” Democratic staffers for the House Energy and Commerce oversight subcommittee reported in a memo released Tuesday.

In testimony prepared for delivery to the panel, Barra said she had no explanation for why it took so long for the safety defect to be “announced.”

“But I can tell you that we will find out,” Barra said. “When we have answers, we will be fully transparent with you, with our regulators and with our customers.”

Barra has asked Anton Valukas, a former U.S. attorney in Chicago, to conduct an internal investigation of the company’s actions, and she said in her prepared testimony that “he has free rein to go where the facts take him, regardless of the outcome.”

Separately, David Friedman, acting chief of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, told the subcommittee that he and his staff “are deeply saddened” by the loss of life stemming from GM’s defective switch. He said that based on a review of his agency’s actions, “we know that the agency examined the available information multiple times using consumer complaints, early warning data, special crash investigations, manufacturer information about how air bags function and other tools.”

However, he said, the agency “did not find sufficient evidence of a possible safety defect or defect trend that would warrant opening an investigation.”

“GM had critical information that would have helped identify this defect,” Friedman said.

On Sunday, the subcommittee, chaired by Republican Tim Murphy of Pennsylvania, said its review of 200,000 pages of NHTSA records showed that the agency knew of multiple fatal crashes and other evidence that the ignition switch defect disabled airbags, but took no action.

 Siemens PLM Software via Flickr

Autism ‘Patchwork’ Begins During Pregnancy

Autism ‘Patchwork’ Begins During Pregnancy

By Kerry Sheridan

Washington (AFP) — The brains of children with autism contain a built-in patchwork of defects, suggesting that the developmental disorder begins while they are growing in the womb, said a U.S. study.

Researchers described their findings in the New England Journal of Medicine as “direct evidence” of a prenatal origin for autism, which affects as many as one in 88 children in the United States and has no known cure.

“Building a baby’s brain during pregnancy involves creating a cortex that contains six layers,” said co-author Eric Courchesne, professor of neurosciences and director of the Autism Center of Excellence at University of California, San Diego.

“We discovered focal patches of disrupted development of these cortical layers in the majority of children with autism.”

For the study, researchers dissected brain tissue from 11 children, aged two to 15, who had been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and who had died, most of them by drowning.

Looking for a specific set of 25 genes that had “robust, consistent, and specific expression patterns in the cortex,” they compared them to brain samples from 11 children without autism, said the study.

Researchers found that 91 percent of the autistic brains were lacking — or showed an unusual pattern — of the expected genetic markers in several layers of the cortex.

The signs of disorganization were found in patches across the different layers of the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain, the parts that are responsible for social function, communication, emotions, and language.

“The most surprising finding was the similar early developmental pathology across nearly all of the autistic brains, especially given the diversity of symptoms in patients with autism, as well as the extremely complex genetics behind the disorder,” said co-author Ed Lein of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle.

Researchers said they still don’t understand why these changes come about in some children, apparently leading to autism, but not in others.

The patchwork nature of the defects does, however, provide a clue as to why autism can affect people in various degrees, from severe to mild disabilities.

It also may explain why some children respond to intensive therapy and become better communicators when identified early, since the brain may be able to rewire some connections to overcome the areas that are not working.

“While autism is generally considered a developmental brain disorder, research has not identified a consistent or causative lesion,” said Thomas Insel, director of National Institute for Mental Health, which funded the study.

“If this new report of disorganized architecture in the brains of some children with autism is replicated, we can presume this reflects a process occurring long before birth.”

The same research team had previously found that the brains of children with autism were heavier than other children’s, and that they had more neurons in the prefrontal cortex.

The brains sampled for this study “represented nearly the entirety of tissue suitable for study at the Brain and Tissue Bank for Developmental Disorders at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center,” said the article.

Still, the fact that only 11 were studied means that more research is necessary, said Andrew Adesman, chief of developmental and behavioral pediatrics at Steven & Alexandra Cohen Children’s Medical Center of New York.

“This study would have been stronger if they had a larger sample and included a group of children who had neurologic deficits but not autism,” said Adesman, who was not involved with the research.

He nevertheless described the team’s techniques for identifying microscopic brain abnormalities as “extremely sophisticated.”

While some of the physical brain changes in autism were already known to science, the latest research provides a more detailed look at how this happens.

“This study is particularly important as it points to the potential role of several genes involved in the specification of distinct cortical layers during early brain development,” said Patrick Hof, vice-chair of the Fishberg Department of Neuroscience, Friedman Brain Institute, and Seaver Autism Center at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Research like this “can provide us with crucial clues to develop novel therapeutic strategies toward a cure,” he said.

©afp.com/Jean-Philippe Ksiazek