corner
Healthy Skepticism
Join us to help reduce harm from misleading health information.
Increase font size   Decrease font size   Print-friendly view   Print
Register Log in

Healthy Skepticism Library item: 18816

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: news

Feeley J, Adams J
Novartis Officials Hid Bone Drugs' Risks, Lawyer Tells Jurors
Bloomberg.com 2010 Nov 2
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-11-01/novartis-officials-hid-risks-of-bone-drugs-aredia-and-zometa-lawyer-says.html


Full text:

Novartis AG officials downplayed risks that the drugmaker’s bone-strengthening medicines Aredia and Zometa could destroy patients’ jaws, a lawyer for a woman suing the company told a North Carolina jury.

Officials of the Basel, Switzerland-based drug company got reports from doctors as early as 2002 that Rita Fussman and other cancer patients taking Aredia and Zometa to prevent bone loss during treatment suffered irreplaceable jawbone damage, Bob Germany, a lawyer for Fussman’s family, said in opening statements in a trial over the medicines. Fussman died in 2009 of complications from breast cancer.

Fussman’s family contends Novartis didn’t adequately warn that Aredia and Zometa could cause disfiguring jaw damage that forced cancer patients such as Fussman to subsist on baby food, Germany told jurors in federal court in Winston-Salem.

Patients and their doctors “were not told the whole story about these drugs,” Germany said. “In fact, we were not told half the story.”

The Fussman family’s lawsuit is the third product-liability case to go to trial over the bone-strengthening treatments, which had 2009 sales of $1.5 billion, according to Novartis’s annual report. Both drugs are still on the market.

Other Trials

Last month, a New Jersey jury rejected a woman’s claims that Aredia and Zometa caused her jaw deterioration. In October 2009, a Montana jury ordered Novartis to pay $3.2 million in damages to a cancer patient who made the same claims over the medicines.

Novartis’s lawyer countered in his opening statement that Aredia and Zometa helped make it easier for patients like the 76-year-old Fussman to deal with cancer and that her history of repeated dental surgeries may have caused her jaw problems.

“She never had excruciating bone pain while she was on Zometa,” Bruce Berger, one of the company’s lawyers, told jurors. The drugs allowed her “to live without the pain of cancer,” he added.

Novartis is facing almost 700 suits over the bone- strengthening medicines, according to court filings.

Some of the cases have been consolidated before a federal judge in Tennessee while others, like Fussman’s, have been sent back to their home courts for trial. Fussman lived in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Still other cases have been heard in state courts around the country.

The case is Estate of Rita Fussman v. Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corp., 06-CV-000149, U.S. District Court, Middle District of North Carolina (Winston-Salem).

 

  Healthy Skepticism on RSS   Healthy Skepticism on Facebook   Healthy Skepticism on Twitter

Please
Click to Register

(read more)

then
Click to Log in
for free access to more features of this website.

Forgot your username or password?

You are invited to
apply for membership
of Healthy Skepticism,
if you support our aims.

Pay a subscription

Support our work with a donation

Buy Healthy Skepticism T Shirts


If there is something you don't like, please tell us. If you like our work, please tell others.

Email a Friend