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The Food and Drug Administration is warning consumers to ditch 26 over-the-counter eye drop products found at big retailers—including CVS, Rite Aid, and Target—due to a risk of infection. Consumers should not buy any of the products and should immediately stop using them if they've already purchased them.

The products include Target's branded Up & Up Dry Eye Relief Lubricant Eye Drops and Up & Up Extreme Relief Dry Eye, as well as Lubricant Eye Drops and Lubricant Gel Drops branded by CVS Health and Rite Aid. The warning also includes eye drop products branded as Rugby and Leader (both from Cardinal Health) and Velocity Pharma. A full list can be found here , as can links to report adverse events.

In an advisory posted Friday, the FDA reported that no infections or adverse events have been linked to the products so far. But the agency said it "found insanitary conditions in the manufacturing facility and positive bacterial test results from environmental sampling of critical drug production areas in the facility."

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After making lots of headlines due to the extremely easy-to-steal nature of some of its cheapest models, Hyundai has a new headache. The Korean automaker is recalling 1.6 million cars in the US after 21 vehicle fires and 22 thermal incidents that have taken place since 2017.

The past couple of years have seen a lot of scaremongering from the anti-electric vehicle crowd. One such nonsensical claim is that EVs will be too heavy for multistory parking lots, but all too often, it's know-nothings or people with an agenda claiming—in the face of actual data—that EVs are a fire risk. On planet Earth, though, the risk of a car fire in a gasoline-powered vehicle is far higher, representing the majority of the 300,000 car fires that occur in the US each year.

This is one such case. The problem is down to an ABS module, or more specifically, the O-rings on the ABS module motor shaft.

Scanning electron micrograph of Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacteria, which cause TB. (credit: National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases )

For the second time, contaminated bone graft products from the medical company Aziyo Biologics Inc. are linked to a highly unusual and deadly outbreak of tuberculosis .

This week, three new tuberculosis cases were identified, bringing the outbreak total to five, according to Politico . One person has died. The contaminated material, used for surgical and dental procedures, was implanted in at least 36 other patients, who are now being treated as if they have tuberculosis.

Aziyo Biologics issued a recall of all of its bone matrix products earlier this month "out of an abundance of caution" after the first two cases were identified. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that all unused products from the affected lot have been sequestered so that they will not be used. The affected materials had been sent to health care facilities in California, Michigan, New York, Oregon, Texas, and Virginia.

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There's another massive airbag safety scandal brewing. Last week, General Motors issued a recall for almost a million SUVs in order to replace potentially dangerous airbag inflators, the third such recall it has had to issue for this problem.

Many vehicles from other OEMs (including BMW, Hyundai Motor Group, and Stellantis) may also contain the same inflators, which can rupture during inflation, spraying shrapnel during a crash. But the supplier that manufactured the airbag inflators has rejected claims by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that there is a systematic defect.

The airbag inflators in question were manufactured by ARC Automotive, a tier-two automotive supplier based in Knoxville, Tennessee, and NHTSA has had an inkling of the problem for some years now. In fact, NHTSA's Office of Defects Investigation started a preliminary evaluation in 2015 of ARC's airbag inflators and whether they could rupture dangerously, following two reports of people suffering shrapnel injuries during a crash when their driver's airbag deployed.

Enlarge / The E46 BMW 3 Series is highly appreciated by enthusiasts, but there's no excuse to not have replaced the Takata airbag by now. (credit: BMW)

In 2015, the largest automotive recall in US history began, due to faulty airbag inflators manufactured by the automotive supplier Takata. At first, 32 million cars were recalled, but the following year, that number grew to as many as 67 million airbags in 42 million vehicles, with at least 24 people killed due to the defective parts. But quite a few recalled cars have not yet had their airbags replaced, and on Thursday, BMW issued a "do not drive" warning to approximately 90,000 owners, telling them to park their vehicles if they have not been fixed.

The problem is a lack of a desiccant or chemical drying agent that would otherwise prevent the ammonium nitrate propellant from taking on moisture due to long-term exposure to heat and humidity. As the propellant ages and takes on moisture, it can fail to properly inflate the airbag during a crash and may even throw metal shrapnel around the vehicle interior.

Takata knew from testing as early as 2000 that some of its airbags might not deploy properly, with the first US incident occurring in 2004. In 2009, a driver in Oklahoma was killed when the airbag in a Honda Accord ruptured, and later that year, Honda recalled half a million cars to fix the problem.

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An alarming outbreak of extensively drug-resistant bacteria linked to eye drops has now sickened 68 people across 16 states, according to the latest update from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention . At least 16 people have been hospitalized, eight have lost vision, and four have had their eyeballs surgically removed (enucleation). One person has died, which was reported earlier.

The agency first released a health alert on the outbreak February 1. At that point, the outbreak had sickened 55 people in 12 states, with the one death reported in a Washington patient. In an update emailed to Ars on February 22, the CDC said the case count had reached 58, with five cases of vision loss and one enucleation.

The continued rise in cases and severe outcomes highlights the challenge of fighting the germ behind the outbreak, which is an extensively drug-resistant form of Pseudomonas aeruginosa . It has the unwieldy name of Verona Integron-mediated Metallo-β-lactamase (VIM) and Guiana-Extended Spectrum-β-Lactamase (GES)-producing carbapenem-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa—or VIM-GES-CRPA, for short.

Enlarge / The recall affects both the Rivian R1S (pictured) and the R1T pickup truck. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

Rivian is in the process of recalling nearly 13,000 R1T trucks and R1S SUVs due to a potential seatbelt problem. It believes that in some vehicles, a sensor within the seatbelt system is missized or "dimensionally out of tolerance," and that could prevent the automatic locking retractor from working properly. That in turn could lead the front passenger airbag to believe the seat was unoccupied during a crash, resulting in it failing to trigger.

Last July, Rivian and its supplier were investigating a vehicle that was displaying a message that the front passenger airbag was off despite having a passenger in that seat. Rivian and its supplier, Autoliv, worked on the problem until January, collecting more potentially suspect parts from other Rivian EVs. In February the startup determined that vehicles with the suspect parts would not be compliant with federal safety regulations and initiated the recall.

Unlike many problems we see on new EVs, this one is not the sort that can just be fixed with a software patch. Although Rivian thinks that only 1 percent of the 12,716 affected cars actually have a defective part, it will inspect and, if necessary, replace the passenger seatbelt components in those affected vehicles.

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Toyota's RAV4 Prime is one of the better plug-in hybrids we've tested . Its 18.1 kWh lithium-ion battery gives it a solid electric-only range of about 40 miles, and its highly efficient Atkinson cycle engine means more than 40 mpg even when the battery is tapped out. But owners of model-year 2021 RAV4 Primes have a trip to the dealership in their future.

Toyota is recalling 16,680 2021 RAV4 Primes in order to fix a software bug that could cause that lithium-ion traction battery to discharge too much, shutting down the hybrid system in the process.

To be more specific, the problem can occur in cold weather. If the RAV4 Prime has been driven continuously in "EV mode," (just using the plug-in hybrid battery, not the internal combustion engine) and the accelerator pedal is then press rapidly to accelerate the vehicle, it's possible for the battery to drop below a specified threshold. "If this occurs, the vehicle will display a warning message and the hybrid system will shut down, resulting in a loss of motive power," according to the recall report .

Enlarge / Early VW ID.4s will need to visit a dealership for a software update. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

Volkswagen is the latest OEM to issue a recall for some of its electric vehicles. This time the problem afflicts the MY2021 ID.4, VW's EV crossover. The problem concerns the battery management control module, as well as the pulse inverter control module. This version of the battery management control unit software can be too sensitive and reset itself in some circumstances, and the pulse inverter control module can, under rare conditions, deactivate if there's a software failure.

VW first had an inkling there was a problem in July 2021 when reports started coming in of potential problems with the high-voltage battery management software. By September 2021, VW had concluded there was no unreasonable risk to drivers but continued studying the problem. By January 2022, VW's supplier told it that the pulse inverter software had problems, too.

Last summer VW went through feedback questionnaires from ID.4 owners and found that "some reports from the US market indicated that the battery management software issue could have led to stalling allegations."