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Plaintiffs Lawyers Target Bayer Over Popular Birth Control Pill
The Recorder
October 20, 2009
Image: Digital Vision
A Newark, Calif., woman and her husband sued drugmaker Bayer in federal court in San Francisco on Monday, saying she suffered a debilitating stroke after taking the company's popular birth control pill Yaz for a month.
Her lawyer, Michael Danko, says he and co-counsel firm Girard Gibbs filed a similar suit last week and are preparing to file more. Hundreds of such suits filed around the country by Danko and other lawyers in the past month or so are just "the tip of the iceberg," triggered by the publication of two recent studies published in the BMJ, a British medical journal, added Danko, of The Danko Law Firm in San Mateo, Calif.
Susan Galinis, 39, had a stroke in June 2008, which she and her husband blame on Yaz that she took for a month after her doctor prescribed it to ease her premenstrual cramps. Their complaint (.pdf) argues that the drug company aggressively promoted Yaz and misled customers about the risks associated with a new version of drospirenone, a synthetic form of the hormone progestin that Yaz and the older drug Yasmin use.
"Bayer reaffirms and stands behind the safety of its drospirenone-containing oral contraceptives," a spokeswoman for Bayer HealthCare said in an e-mailed statement Monday, adding that the complaints the company has reviewed so far "pertain to side effects that are warned about in our approved product labeling."
Bayer had been served with 129 lawsuits related to Yaz and Yasmin as of Oct. 8, the spokeswoman said. The two drugs are the company's best-selling pharmaceutical products, according to Bayer's most recent annual report. Total sales of the Yaz and Yasmin drugs were about $1.8 billion in 2008, the report said.
Danko said it appears that suits filed in state courts are largely being removed the same day and sent to federal court in the Southern District of Illinois, after Bayer files removal petitions. "The plaintiffs are certainly satisfied with the federal court system," he said.
Other plaintiffs are suing San Francisco-based McKesson Corp., the distributor of the drugs, in state court, Danko said.
Danko plans to seek a leadership position, along with Girard Gibbs, in the multidistrict litigation.
"There are no benefits to this drug, and there are greater risks," Danko said. "The reason they're using a synthetic hormone is because they can patent it."
Some plaintiffs attorneys are waiting for the results of other studies before filing what Danko expects will be thousands of suits, he said, so it's difficult to tell who has the cases and where they're being filed.
"I feel we know what the studies are going to say," Danko added. "The studies that we have now are certainly sufficient to proceed with litigation."
