Jury Awards Family $1 Billion For PPH Death

admin — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 03:12:43 +0000

The family of a Texas woman was awarded an enormous $US1.013 billion ($A1.38 billion) today by a jury in Beaumont, Texas, which found the drug maker Wyeth was responsible for the woman’s death four-and-a-half years after she took one of the company’s “fen-phen” diet drugs.

Cynthia Cappel-Coffey, 41, took the drug Pondimin between November 1996 and June 1997.

In December 2001, she developed a fatal lung condition, called primary pulmonary hypertension. She died last year.

The verdict, which Wyeth said it would appeal and financial analysts predict would not stand, prolongs the legal costs stemming from the diet drugs that the Madison, N.J., company pulled from the market in 1997 after some users developed heart-valve damage.

Wyeth has set aside $US16.6 billion ($A22.59 billion) to resolve lawsuits by former fen-phen users.

It reached a class-action settlement for $US3.75 billion ($A5.1 billion) with more than 125,000 former users of the diet drugs in 2000.

Another 70,000 fen-phen users opted out of the settlement to take their cases to trial.

Most of the remaining cases allege heart-valve damage as a result of the drugs. The PPH cases represent only a fraction of 1 per cent of the diet drug litigation, Wyeth said.

The company has settled all other PPH cases out of court.

Original Article

Jury Awards Family $1 Billion For PPH Death is a post from: PPH Claim Center