Unsafe Drugs & Medical Devices

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 …

December 11th, 2013

Over a year ago, this blog published an article about the dangers of Stevens-Johnson syndrome, a serious condition that causes a dark red rash to appear on the skin. Health Canada, Canada’s counterpart to the United States’ Food and Drug Administration (FDA), recently sent an …

November 27th, 2013

It might surprise one to learn that 80 percent of pharmaceuticals currently prescribed in the United States are generic. But would it be surprising to know that brand-name drug manufacturers and those that make generic drugs were not always subject to the same rules? Earlier …

October 16th, 2013

Hormone replacement therapy (HRT) drugs are a popular therapeutic option for women going through menopause. The idea is that replacing the body’s diminishing supply of estrogen and progesterone may alleviate discomfort, prolong life, or even delay or reduce the onset of dementia. Three recently published …

September 25th, 2013

Sutentis a drug manufactured by Pfizer is prescribed by doctors to treat cancer of the pancreas, stomach, bowels, and kidney. Recently, however, Sutent has been linked to cases of the potentially fatal Stevens-Johnson syndrome and its more severe form, toxic epidermal necrolysis. For this reason, …

August 21st, 2013

The blog aboutlawsuits.com recently published a blog post by Irvin Jackson about a new study that deals with doctors receiving “kickbacks” from pharmaceutical companies or drug representatives for prescribing a given medication. Scholars at the Rady School of Management at University of California, San Diego …

August 14th, 2013

The British Medical Journal: Quality and Safety recently published a study evaluating the role equipment and technology play in surgical mistakes. The article appeared on July 25 on the journal’s web site and is titled, “Surgical technology and operating-room safety failures: a systematic review of …