Ortho Evra Personal Injury Lawsuit Filed Against Johnson & Johnson and Other Companies
Product liability and the specific actions of pharmaceutical companies are often central issues during defective drug cases, and a recent personal injury lawsuit against Johnson & Johnson and other distributors of the Ortho Evra birth control patch provides a good example of this point.
The personal injury lawyers of 11 women across the United States sued Johnson & Johnson and other companies who manufactured, marketed and distributed the Ortho Evra Patch on February 9th in a Los Angeles Superior Court. Specifically, these lawyers claim that the defendants did not warn the public about the elevated risks of using Ortho Evra, which included blood clots and strokes.
All 11 women, ages 19 to 44, claim in the personal injury lawsuit that they suffered blood clots after using this contraceptive patch. The 44-year-old woman alleges that Ortho Evra caused her stroke, while six of the plaintiffs experienced a pulmonary embolism. Their lawyers say that Johnson & Johnson and the other defendants knew that the Ortho Evra Patch increased the risks for the above ailments, and yet withheld this information until four years after the product's 2002 release.
According to a California personal injury lawyer representing at least one of the women in this lawsuit, the defendants intentionally concealed internal studies showing that women who used Ortho Evra were two times more likely to experience blood clots, strokes or other similar reactions. Brian Kabateck added that the defendants downplayed Ortho Evra side effects and personal injuries as being limited to minor symptoms like nausea, headaches and a skin reaction where applied.
Kabateck further said that these defendants knew that the Ortho Evra Patch delivers 60% more estrogen to women than oral contraceptives; a percentage which he says has been shown to increase the risks for these alleged Ortho Evra personal injuries. However, the defendants did not mention this important detail, which Kabateck and others find especially disturbing considering that Ortho Evra has been prescribed to more than four million U.S. women since becoming commercially available more than four years ago.
The 11 women filing suit against Johnson & Johnson are from California, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, New York, Georgia and Indiana. They claim that Ortho Evra is one of the most popular, brand-name birth control prescriptions in the country and the only one to be marketed as the once-a-week birth control patch. Like oral birth control pills, the Ortho Evra Patch helps women avert pregnancies by preventing ovulation, thickening the cervical mucus and changing the endometrium to reduce the chance of implantation.
Johnson & Johnson Personal Injury Lawsuit: Larger Implications of Ortho Evra Claims!
Subsequent developments in this personal injury case should be interesting, especially if the attorneys of these women are able to show that Ortho Evra caused their ailments and that the defendants knew of the risks but did not reveal this information to the public.
Ultimately, this case is another example of the growing concern with pharmaceutical companies putting profits before health. A recent story in The New York Times detailed how Eli Lilly and Company encouraged employees in internal memos to keep information showing that its top-selling drug Zyprexa increased the risk factors for diabetes private. Whether Johnson & Johnson and other defendants are proven guilty of similar motives remains to be seen, but the growing instances of such claims does not do much for the public's trust of pharmaceutical giants.