West Virginia updates in category: FDA & Prescription Drugs

According to a recent study of DEA statistics carried out by the Associated Press, consumers have nearly doubled the amount of money spent on narcotic analgesics between 1997 and 2005. According to the study, the consumption of five major painkillers - codeine, morphine, oxycodone, hydrocodone, and meperidine - rose 88 percent between 1997 and 2005. Oxycontin is primarily responsible for that...

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Virginia Cavender has been awarded $75,000 from a federal court jury in St. Louis for claims that pharmaceutical giant Wyeth's diet drug Fen-Phen caused damage to her heart valves. The jury needed less than seven hours to deliberate her claims of failure to warn and breach of implied warranty.Cavender says that she used Wyeth's Pondimin (fenfluramine) and the generic phentermine for a period of...

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Peggie Stanford has filed a wrongful death suit against GlaxoSmithKline, the maker of diabetes drug Avandia, in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. Stanford claims her 60-year-old husband, Larry, had been using an Avandia variant when he died of a heart attack earlier this year. Stanford suffered the fatal heart attack the same day that the New England Journal of Medicine...

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U.S. District Judge E. Richard Webber has upheld Virginia Cavender's claims of design-defect, breach-of-warranty, and negligence against pharmaceutical company Wyeth. Cavender, who took the weight loss combination drug fen-phen, claims that it caused heart damage in the form of "moderately severe aortic regurgitation."Judge Webber denied Wyeth's motion for partial summary judgment, ruling that...

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Nearly 5,000 families with an autistic child have filed claims against the U.S. government, alleging that their children's autism resulted from childhood vaccinations. The first test case began in a hearing last Monday in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, and was presided over by three special masters. Should the courts find in favor of the families, they will receive vindication and monetary...

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Retired FBI agent Gerald Barnett, who claims that the painkiller Vioxx caused his 2002 heart attack, must choose between $1.6 million and a retrial of his claims, a federal judge ruled. Last September a jury awarded Barnett $1 million in punitive damages and $50 million in compensatory damages, but U.S. District Judge Eldon E. Fallon ordered a retrial on damages, ruling that $50 million in...

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On May 21, the FDA issued a warning to endocrinologists, doctors, and consumers that the Type 2 diabetes drug Avandia has been link to an increased risk of heart attack and other ischemic heart-related problems. The link was discovered in a study published by the New England Journal of Medicine, which found that the risk of heart attack was 43% greater in persons taking the drug. The study...

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On May 10, in Abingdon, Virginia, the maker of the powerful painkiller OxyContin and three of its current and former executives pleaded guilty to misleading the public about the drug's risk of addiction. Purdue Pharma, LP, its president, top lawyer, and former chief medical officer will pay $634.5 million in fines for claiming the drug was less addictive and less subject to abuse than other...

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The Food and Drug Administration has issued a warning regarding unusual side effects of prescription sleeping pills. The makers of 13 prescription sleeping aids will now be required to put warnings on their labels cautioning that the drug may cause sleep-driving, along with other less dangerous "complex sleep-related behaviors" - like making phone calls, fixing and eating food, and having sex...

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In late August the consumer watchdog group petitioned the FDA to place stronger warnings about the possibility of tendon rupture on the labels of the Fluoroquinolone class of antibiotics. The drug makers say that they do in fact warn of tendon rupture, but Public Citizen argues the warnings a buried in a list of adverse events and calls for a "black box" warning - the FDA's strongest warning for...

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