Jill Riepenhoff

When a new toy or baby invention hits the market, most parents assume those products have undergone rigorous safety testing. Our investigators found this isn't always the case.

Parents, consumer advocates, pediatricians and others are sounding alarms about a baby product named in death reports: weighted infant sleepwear.

Every year, foodborne illnesses sicken 50 million Americans and claim an estimated 3,000 lives. The food safety system is governed by 15 different federal agencies responsible for the enforcement of 30 laws. But that oversight, food safety advocates say, is fractured.

All-Terrain Vehicles and Side by Sides send about 100,000 Americans to the emergency room every year. Children under the age of 16 riding ATVs have the highest risk for death.

For most patients seeking damages for an injury related to flu, measles, polio and other public health vaccines, the process is well-established and transparent. The process also keeps manufacturers out of legal processes and puts the lawsuits in the hands of special federal vaccine courts. But for more than 10,000 Americans who filed a claim due to a potential COVID vaccine-related injury, the process is slow, secretive and handled by a little-known agency that had only four employees when claims began arriving in 2021.

Recalls of dangerous consumer products can sometimes take months if not years. But even after a recall, similar-looking products remain on the market. InvestigateTV examined toys that had been recalled and similar-looking products that weren't.

The DOD paid out nearly $1 billion in claims, but providers often show clean public disciplinary record

Thousands of children have been injured by ingesting water beads - tiny specks about the size of a cookie sprinkle that expand 100 times their size when exposed to water.

Every year, the CPSC finds thousands of everyday household products for sale online or arriving at shipping ports that fail to meet federal safety standards. It is illegal to sell products in the U.S. that have been banned, recalled or failed to meet federal safety standards.

Many national fraternities have established their own insurance companies that primarily protect headquarter executives, often leaving the burden of cost and blame on the undergraduate members.

An InvestigateTV analysis of Consumer Product Safety Commission data shows that since 2000, the agency has had to re-announce the recall of at least 46 products because the original alert did not reach the ears of consumers and, in many cases, continued to cause harm.

The state where a baby is born determines what serious and rare disorders he or she will be screened for shortly after birth. It’s a patchwork of policies across the country that could have dire consequences. Some parents call it death by ZIP code.

Bowling Green State University in Ohio agreed to a $2.9 million settlement with the family of Stone Foltz, who died in 2021 following an alcohol-fueled fraternity hazing event. The university vowed to unite with the Foltzes in their mission to eradicate hazing. The Foltzes sued Bowling Green, in part, for its failure to punish the bad actors on its campus in the years prior to Stone’s death. Their lawsuit listed dozens of examples in which allegations of hazing weren’t fully investigated by the university or cases in which fraternities and sororities were merely placed on probation for serious violations. It's a similar story at other campuses across the country.

Despite its best efforts to safeguard consumers from dangerous household items, a report from a non-profit consumer group found the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission is hamstrung, in large part, by Congress.

More than two decades ago, the death of a toddler in a recalled portable crib prompted Congress to pass a new consumer protection law. Yet today, children still are dying in unsafe products, recalls remain largely ineffective at ridding homes of dangerous products, and the CPSC website that was supposed to help creates a false sense of security, an InvestigateTV analysis of federal records shows.

Hazing on college campuses claims lives and injures and humiliates countless others, yet government officials fail to enact strong laws to curb the persistent problem.

When a company learns a product it sells could be defective and dangerous, it has 24 hours to let the federal government’s Consumer Product Safety Commission know about it. But it could take months or years for the public to find out about the company’s possible concerns, if they even come to light at all. InvestigateTV has been battling CPSC and companies to disclose information about the products companies have sounded the alarm on – an alarm that remains relatively silent.

For many college coaches, it pays to get fired. Over a 17-year period beginning in 2005, public universities have shelled out more than $1.1 billion in buying out the contracts of college coaches, according to an InvestigateTV analysis of NCAA financial data collected by Syracuse University. Most of that money was spent on football coaches who play at the highest level of Division I athletics. As football coaches' annual compensation now stretches into seven digits, massive severance payments also grow bigger and bigger.

After the deaths of 13 children over the last 12 years, this summer, Fisher-Price and the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission warned parents not to let their children sleep in certain rockers the company has made since the 1990s. Now, InvestigateTV has discovered that during a 2021 Congressional hearing, the company dodged questions about whether it currently had products on the market linked to children’s deaths.

Safe Sleep for Babies Act will save lives by removing two dangerous baby sleeping products from the U.S. market.

A new federal law takes effect in July that aims to clean up thoroughbred horseracing, which for years has been plagued by scandals, drugs and equine fatalities. Racing insiders have pushed for decades for such a measure and they welcome the new oversight.

Consumer advocates say the time is long past due to lift the cloak of secrecy at the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. The issue rests with a provision in the Consumer Product Safety Act, known as Section 6(b), which requires the agency to receive approval from manufacturers before releasing any information about a specific product.

It takes years for the Consumer Product Safety Commission to remove dangerous products from the market because of its cumbersome rule-making process and ineffective recalls that don’t incentivize consumers to return or destroy dangerous items.

The federal agency created to watchdog consumer products - from crock pots to xylophones - is muzzled by its governing law, which gives all the power to manufacturers, including those with dangerous toys, appliances and other items on the market. The Fisher-Price Rock N Play – an inclined sleep product that defied the American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines for safe infant sleeping – exposed all that is wrong with the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

The lack of access to dental care plagues many parts of rural America.

Bridging the Great Health Divide explores issues in rural America through the lens of residents, doctors and other health care providers.

Before last year food insecurity impacted about 10% of all U.S. residents. Experts estimate that number has at least doubled since the pandemic.

In 207 counties in 2018, there wasn’t a family, general or internal medicine doctor – the primary care doctors mainly for adults, according to an InvestigateTV analysis of federal data.

The federal government told credit reporting agencies they could relax investigations into consumers' disputes during the pandemic. At the same time, complaints against the agencies more than doubled from the previous year.

Every year millions of dollars flow to nursing homes from a fund that is padded with fines collected from long-term care facilities that inspections show have put the health and safety of residents in jeopardy.

Some nursing homes are beginning to allow visitors, but hundreds report to the federal government that they are experiencing staff shortages or have no protective masks in their supplies.

Officials have known about a top opioid prescriber for at least five years. This week the Tennessee and Alabama doctor was federally indicted for illegally distributing opioids, kickbacks and more.

For three months, InvestigateTV has tracked federal government data on nursing home COVID-19 cases and deaths. For three months, those numbers have been wrong.

Only around a quarter of the nation's largest universities publicly release active COVID-19 case information. Public health experts say the more data available, the better.

Hundreds of nursing homes with poor ratings are waiting to get into a program intended to improve care.

Residents have been abused, neglected and ignored under the government’s watch. Oversight weakened because of COVID-19.

Federal nursing home coronavirus case data remains flawed, and some members of Congress say that needs to change.

InvestigateTV is monitoring coronavirus COVID-19 cases around the country and updating information here frequently.