When is a conservative court not a conservative court? When it expands tort liability, apparently:
Last month, in Wyeth v. Weeks, the Alabama Supreme Court adopted an aggressive new theory of tort liability that threatens to return Alabama to a litigation era so hostile to business and industry that the state was dubbed "Tort Hell."
In Weeks, the Court held, over Justice Glenn Murdock's 46-page dissent, that "[u]nder Alabama law, a brand-name drug company may be held liable for fraud or misrepresentation...by a plaintiff claiming physical injury caused by a generic drug manufactured by a different company." Translation: In Alabama, a company can be held liable for injuries caused by the use of its competitors' products.
Dangerous Drugs recently published news that the drug Samsca (tolvaptan) has been associated with “irreversible and potentially fatal liver injury.”
The news was first broken by the FDA, which discovered the association between Samsca use and liver damage as part of a “double-blind, 3-year, placebo-controlled study” of about 1,400 patients with a type of kidney disease.
As a result of this, many Samsca lawyers are now reviewing potential Samsca lawsuits. Although it is too early to tell which lawsuits will succeed, attorney Justinian Lane is willing to speak to anyone who suffered liver damage while taking the drug Samsca.
I spent several hours last week reviewing the evidence surrounding the DePuy ASR and ASR XL hip recall, and I've come to the conclusion that these are going to be great lawsuits from a damages perspective.
Some people who received recalled DePuy hip replacements have had to undergo multiple hip replacement surgeries. The medical bills alone from those surgeries are probably going to be close to six figures. On top of that, the DePuy hips can cause cobalt and chromium metal shavings to enter the bloodstream. This in turn can lead to muscle necrosis, which is irreversible.
A worst-case scenario is that bone and muscle decay is so extreme that a patient cannot be fitted with another hip replacement. If that happens, a person may become unable to walk. Considering that the market for DePuy ASR hips was younger, more active people, the damages may be quite large.
I'm working right now on putting up a De Puy hip lawyer website to share some more of the information about the ASR hips that I've discovered. And of course, if you'd like more information, feel free to contact me directly.
Which is the better approach - to yank a dangerous drug, or severely restrict it?
In Europe, however, patients currently on rosiglitazone-containing drugs will have to find other options, now that the European Medicines Agency has suspended the marketing authorization for the treatments. As DJN reports, the EMA says patients taking rosiglitazone shouldn’t stop on their own, but should make an appointment with a physician to discuss their options.
Not sure what's going on at J&J, but clearly the company is having some quality control issues.
The facility in Lancaster, Pa., is the third Johnson & Johnson plant to be flagged this year by the Food and Drug Administration for serious manufacturing defects -- an unusual number for a single company.
