Judge rules against Wyeth
A Navada judge awarded damages to three women with breast cancer caused by Premarin and Prempro hormone replacement produced by Wyeth. The intitial damages awarded was $134 million but was later reduced to $58 million as the initial sum was excessive. This is the largest award to date against Wyeth, which faces about 5,300 similar lawsuits across the country in state and federal courts.
The judge concluded in his opinion “There was substantial evidence from which the jury could conclude that Wyeth knew that its product could cause breast cancer, that it intentionally failed to conduct adequate tests, that it financed and manipulated scientific studies and sponsored articles in professional and scientific journals that deliberately minimized the risk of cancer while over-promoting certain benefits and citing others which it knew to be unsubstantiated.”
In addition, after a large federal study in 2003 linked HRT drugs like Prempro and Premarin to an increased risk of breast cancer millions of women stopped taking HRT. In 2007, a study by the National Cancer Institute found that breast cancer incidence rates in women in the United States fell 6.7 percent in 2003 from the previous year and have since stabilized. Many experts attributed the drop in breast cancer rates to the fact that many women quit using HRTs once they were linked to breast cancer.
The original article can be found at www.newsinferno.com/archives/2604
