Consumer Groups

One on One is a weekly feature offering excerpts of interviews conducted by The Evening Sun with newsworthy business leaders. Janelle Cousino is executive director of the Maryland Citizen Action Coalition, a 10-year-old consumer advocacy group with 67,000 members statewide. It is affiliated with the national organization Citizen Action.Q. You're known for your efforts in the legislature concerning automobile and health insurance. What are your goals in the upcoming legislative session?A. We want to make the insurance relationship with consumers fairer.

Each year, about 23,000 children ages 15 months and younger receive hospital emergency-room treatment for injuries caused by falls while secured in one of the most popular baby items available -- infant baby walkers. According to the Consumer Products Safety Commission, walkers account for more injuries than any other juvenile product on the market.Of those injuries, about 80 percent occurred when the walker and baby careened down a set of stairs; in many cases, that happened even when a gate was in place.

WASHINGTON -- A law meant to protect Marylanders whe they buy homes is "totally inadequate" and could be costing homebuyers at settlement, a consumer group said yesterday.The Consumer Federation of America and the National Association of Realtors said in a joint news conference that most real estate agents work for property sellers and that agents should be required to disclose that to buyers.The two groups said they would push states -- including Maryland -- to strengthen real estate agent disclosure laws.

WASHINGTON -- Fuel efficiency of new passenger cars sold in the United States hasn't bounced back to the peak it reached in 1988, said the Public Citizen consumer group in a report released yesterday."

WASHINGTON - In recent years, critics have said the Food and Drug Administration focuses too much energy on approving new drugs and pays too little attention to health risks from medicines once they're on the market - and used by a much larger population. Two months ago, responding to that criticism on the eve of hearings examining the safety of Bextra, Celebrex, Vioxx and other painkillers, the FDA announced the creation of an oversight board to aggressively monitor drugs once they're on the market and tell the public about emerging health risks.

Agriculture Department officials say they are discussing the possibility of easing their new standards for preventing salmonella contamination in ground beef used for the nation's school lunch program. The reconsideration, provoked by criticism from the food industry, has angered consumer advocates. Since June, the department, which provides 70 percent of the ground beef used in schools, has required that every batch it buys be free of salmonella, bacteria responsible for about 600 deaths and 1.4 million illnesses last year.

The federal government is proposing a rule aimed at giving consumers better estimates of the total cost of a home loan, but the mortgage finance industry and consumer advocates have expressed concern that the measure is being rushed. Without providing specifics on the rule, which would overhaul the mortgage application process, the Department of Housing and Urban Development submitted what it called a final version last month to the Office of Management and Budget. A version of the rule proposed a year and a half ago would have required lenders to offer a single price for the costs of processing the mortgage - including such expenses as appraisals and title insurance - or to stick much more closely to initial estimates of those costs.

The court decision allowing the "Baby Bells" into information services gives the nation's seven regional telephone monopolies greater opportunities to rip off consumers and drive out competition, a new report from the Consumer Federation of America charged yesterday."

During the nation's home-refinance boom, too many minority borrowers have wound up with high-cost, subprime loans when they could have qualified for some of the lowest mortgage interest rates in history, according to a consumer advocacy group's study released yesterday. The study, part of a continuing attempt to document racial disparity in subprime mortgages - loans with higher-than-prime interest rates and fees, typically designed for credit-troubled borrowers - was conducted by the ACORN Group, a consumer-advocacy organization based in Washington.

Maryland Public Interest Research Group's recent press release on the deceptive practices of credit-card issuers wasn't quite upfront, either. The release quotes several local people on the abuses by credit-card issuers. But similar releases issued by nonprofit Public Interest Research Groups in other parts of the country have the same or very similar quotes attributed to people in those areas. Some journalism experts question the practice of recycling quotes. But PIRG officials said the practice is done routinely by them as a way to localize a press release on a tight budget.