Unsafe Drugs & Medical Devices

January 7th, 2015

Back in October 2012, this blog began covering a fungal meningitis outbreak originating in Massachusetts that eventually killed sixty-four people and injured over 750 more across twenty states. Authorities traced the debilitating outbreak to the New England Compounding Center, a pharmaceutical company that provided personalized …

December 17th, 2014

This blog has been covering issues related to generic drugs–warning labels, FDA oversight, and legal immunity–for more than a year, but this industry is nothing if not persistent. One of the largest manufacturers of generic pharmaceuticals in the world–Ranbaxy Laboratories, with net revenue of $2 …

December 10th, 2014

In the past few months, this blog has explored ways in which class action lawsuits and FDA regulation affect the lives of everyday Americans. Today we will discuss the corporation Herbalife–which sells “nutrition, weight-management, energy and fitness, and personal care products”–in a story that combines …

September 17th, 2014

This past June, in an article about a potential link between testosterone treatment and cardiovascular problems, we explained that the FDA had (after about ten years of urging by researchers) decided to launch an investigation into the matter. It turns out that it only took a …

June 25th, 2014

Over the past decade, according to the New York Times, testosterone replacement therapy (a form of hormone replacement) has quadrupled among men aged 40 and older. By 2011, about one in 25 men in their 60s was on a testosterone replacement plan. While this figure …

April 2nd, 2014

The last week in February, Michael Walsh published an article in the New Jersey Law Journal claiming that courts are “relegating failure-to-warn claims, the decades-old staple of medical products liability, to the trash bin of tort jurisprudence” in favor of parallel claims. Walsh points to three …

January 29th, 2014

The seemingly never-ending products liability case in Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court Lance v. Wyeth has finally drawn to a close after more than three years of arguments and appeals. This case involves Catherine Ruth Lance, whose family argues that Wyeth (a pharmaceutical company) was negligent in …

January 22nd, 2014

In the past few months, this blog has addressed issues concerning the safety of generic drugs. In July we published an article about the Supreme Court protecting manufacturers of generics in cases in which victims were harmed due to inadequate warning labels. Fortunately, the FDA …

January 8th, 2014

About one year ago, a fungal meningitis outbreak in New England affected nearly eight hundred individuals in twenty states, claiming over sixty lives in the process. The source of these infections was the New England Compounding Center (NECC) in Massachusetts, which was an active distributor …