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Over the past several months, Toyota Motor Corporation has recalled nearly 9 million vehicles due to sticky gas pedals and floor mat interference, which can cause sudden/unintentional acceleration, steering column problems and brake problems. Sudden/unintentional acceleration can cause serious injuries and even death.

On February 23, 2010, Akio Toyoda, president of Toyota acknowledged in prepared remarks made public that the automaker’s efforts to expand resulted in lax safety standards.

The driver of a Toyota Prius who called 911 on March 8, 2010 to report his accelerator was stuck finally got the car stopped after about 20 minutes with the help of the California Highway Patrol, officers said, according to a recently published Los Angeles Times news report.

“He was reaching speeds over 90 miles per hour,” CHP Officer Larry Landeros said of the driver, James Sikes. A Toyota spokesman said that the company, which has recalled millions of vehicles because of reports of unintended acceleration, was sending a representative to investigate the cause of the incident.

The cell phone call came about 1:30 p.m. from the driver of the 2008 Prius eastbound on Interstate 8 in San Diego County. “He was driving near the La Posta Indian Reservation when he called 911 and said his gas pedal was stuck,” Landeros said.

“I pushed the gas pedal to pass a car and it did something kind of funny, it jumped and it just stuck there,” Sikes, 61, said at a news conference. “As it was going, I was trying the brakes, it wasn’t stopping.”

A CHP patrol officer caught up to the Prius about 20 minutes later and used a loudspeaker to tell the driver to apply his emergency brake in tandem with the brake pedal, Landeros said.

Sudden unintended acceleration has allegedly been the cause of 56 fatal accidents involving Toyotas in the U.S., going back as far as 2004.

The Prius that Sikes was driving was one of more than 4 million Toyota vehicles recalled in November because of the reported acceleration problems.

We first discussed hospital radiation errors first surfaced back in October 2009, when Cedars-Sinai Medical Center officials notified the Los Angeles Times that over 200 patients were inappropriately exposed to high doses of radiation from CT brain scans used to diagnose strokes. An estimated 40% of the patients lost patches of hair as a result of the overdoses, a hospital spokesman said.

On February 24, 2010, a Missouri hospital said that it had over radiated 76 patients, the vast majority with brain cancer, during a five-year period because powerful new radiation equipment had been set up incorrectly even with a representative of the manufacturer watching as it was done, according to a recent New York Times news report.

The hospital, CoxHealth in Springfield, said half of all patients undergoing a particular type of treatment stereotactic radiation therapy were overdosed by about 50 percent after an unidentified medical physicist at the hospital miscalibrated the new equipment and routine checks over the next five years failed to catch the error.

The revelation comes at a time of growing concern about safety procedures for a new generation of powerful, computer-controlled medical radiation equipment.

The error was discovered in September 2009 only after a second physicist received training on the equipment, made by BrainLAB, and the hospital began questioning whether the machine had been installed correctly in 2004, in a process called commissioning.

The overdoses at CoxHealth occurred in a state where there is little or no government oversight of radiation therapy, a fact that Robert H. Bezanson, the hospital’s president and chief executive, chose to emphasize.

“The initiative should be broadened to include regulation of medical radiation therapy as well,” he wrote. “We have also learned that the incident here at CoxHealth is, unfortunately, not an isolated occurrence. Rather, similar instances of medical overradiation have occurred at other hospitals throughout the country. Without increased regulation and oversight, these instances of medical overradiation will likely continue.”

The hospital promised to work with state legislators on ways to better regulate radiation therapy.

Last month, The New York Times documented the harm that can result from radiation errors when basic safety rules are not followed. It also found that in a variety of ways, the pace of technology had outpaced the ability of the medical profession and regulators to keep up.

The overdoses in Springfield echoed what occurred at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida where a similar commissioning error resulted in 77 brain cancer patients’ receiving 50 percent more radiation than prescribed in 2004 and 2005. The failure of medical facilities to properly commission new radiological equipment was cited as a concern last November by the American Association of Physicists in Medicine.

More and more reports of Toyota owners experiencing sudden acceleration have been revealed since the recent recalls of millions of vehicles. Toyota announced that the problem was due to sticky gas pedals and floor mat interference, but the U.S. government claims that comments made by the automaker are deceptive. As a result the U.S. government launched a probe to investigate the issue at hand and in recent days has shifted its focus to electronic throttle system in Toyota and Lexus vehicles.

On February 4, 2010, relatives of a California woman killed in the crash of her Toyota Camry sued the automaker on and demanded the company vastly expand its recall according to a Reuters News report. The suit asserts the crash that killed Noriko Uno, 66, was triggered by a defect in Toyota’s electronic “drive-by-wire” throttle system, which the car maker has so far ruled out as a cause of incidents of unintended acceleration in its vehicles.

Toyota has recalled nearly 8 million vehicles worldwide, including 2.3 million in the United States for the repair of sticking gas pedals in its eight top-selling models and millions of other Toyota vehicles were recalled for floor mat adjustments.

For the Camry, which accounts for the largest number of U.S. vehicles involved, the recalls cover 2007 through 2010 model-year cars. Uno’s car, bought new by the family from a local dealership, was a 2006 model, though it had just 10,000 miles on it at the time of the crash.

“Witnesses saw her vehicle rocketing 100 miles an hour, weaving in and out of traffic trying to avoid hitting people and it eventually hit a curb, went airborne, hit a pole, then hit a tree, and she died,” he said.

The Uno accident took place August 28, 2009, the same day as the crash of a runaway Lexus driven by an off-duty California Highway Patrol officer near San Diego that killed him and three others.