Articles Posted in Defective Medicine

Last night “60 Minutes” did a segment on “Lethal medicine linked to meningitis outbreak.” The New England Compounding Center was producing a steroid that helps to relieve chronic pain in patients’ backs and joints. This steroid has lead to 50 deaths and other significant problems for 700 innocent patients. This is all due to the…

Wyeth Pharmaceuticals Inc., (now owned by Pfizer) a pharmaceutical company has agreed to pay $490.9 million to resolve the unlawful marketing of the prescription drug Rapamune. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) did not approve it as safe and effective, the Justice Department announced the other day. Rapamune is an “immunosuppressive” drug that prevents…

GranuFlo and Naturalyte are two dialysis products recalled by the Food and Drug Administration. Fresenius Medical Care, the world’s largest provider of dialysis clinics and products, manufactures both GranuFlo and Naturalyte. The FDA has issued a Class 1 recall – the most urgent type of recall – on both products. This recall is reserved for…

There has been a decent amount of coverage on the prescription drugs Januvia and Byetta. Januvia (sitagliptin) and Byetta are both injectable drugs, and provide a new way of treating type 2 diabetes. They both help control blood sugar levels by encouraging production of a hormone called glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1). They have potential advantages…

A pain shot made in a Tennessee pharmacy may be contaminated and could be making people sick. This is very similar to the meningitis outbreak that happened last year. The results of this outbreak are less severe than the outbreak of the meningitis illnesses, but there are infections at the site of where the pain…

The FDA has recently announced that they will be investigating the safety of several diabetes medications due to some troubling scientific evidence. A group of academic researchers took pancreatic tissue samples from patients who had been taking these diabetes medications found that some of the patients had inflammation and cellular changes that often precede cancer,…

Merck, the manufacturer of the bone-loss medication Fosamax, has recently been ordered to pay $285,000 to a woman who suffered osteonecrosis (dead jaw) as a result of taking this drug. Reuters reports that the plaintiff suffered from bone disease and delayed healing after a routine tooth extraction. The jury decided in favor of the plaintiff,…

Multidistrict Litigation (MDL) on the problematic drug Pradaxa has been moved up to begin in March of 2014, as opposed to previously scheduled August 2014. There are currently over 175 cases pending in this MDL in Southern Illinois. In preparation for the upcoming proceedings, both the plaintiffs and Boehringer Ingelheim, the manufacturer of the anticoagulant…

Bayer could have to pay up to or more than $1.2 billion in order to settle personal injury lawsuits over the company’s Yaz and Yasmin oral contraceptives. For Bayer’s second quarter stockholder update, Bayer told its investors that it is currently facing nearly 13,000 Yaz and Yasmin lawsuits. In July 2012, Bayer accepted a settlement…

The birth control drugs Yaz, Yasmin and Ocella are facing increasing litigation citing some serious complications. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, a recent study listed Yaz and Yasmin as the second worst drugs on the market for adverse events. Between Yaz and Yasmin alone, over 8,000 adverse side effects were reported to the FDA…