Attorney’s Widow Seeks To Toss GSK's Paxil Case Win

Attorney’s Widow Seeks To Toss GSK's Paxil Case Win

Introduction

On December 19, attorneys for a plaintiff filed a petition with the U.S. Supreme Court requesting to determine whether her claims were preempted because federal law prevents GlaxoSmithKline from adding a suicide warning label in Paxil taken by her deceased husband as an antidepressant.

The Seventh Circuit sanctioned an appeal filed by the company in August to reverse a $3 million jury award given to the widow of a lawyer who worked as a partner at a law firm and consumed the generic version of Paxil before jumping in front of a commuter train to commit suicide in 2010. According to a 2011 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, generic drug companies are not responsible for failing to provide inadequate label warnings since federal law requires them to use only brand versions' labels.  

Paxil lawsuits are consolidated for pre-trial proceedings in the Central District of California (withdrawal) and in the  Philadelphia County Court of Common Pleas (birth defects). U.S. District Court Judge Mariana Pfaelzer overlooks the MDL No. 1574 (Ninth Circuit: In re Paxil Products Liability Litigation) in the Central District of California for cases filed over withdrawal symptoms.

Getinge AB, the Swiss parent company of Atrium Medical Corporation, has set aside an amount totaling to $200 million (SEK 1.8 billion) to cover the ongoing costs of litigation and future hernia mesh settlements involving around 900 lawsuits filed against Atrium Medical in the U.S and Canada.

Earlier, in a conference call, the Chief Executive Officer Mattias Perjos and Chief Financial Officer Lars Sandstrom of Getinge confirmed that the plan had been outlined to cover all present and future costs linked to the litigation over Atrium hernia mesh defects. Apart from the $200 million compensation, the company also revealed it has liability insurance to cover the expenses involved in some or all of the Atrium hernia mesh cases. The Food and Drug Administration had announced a recall for certain C-Qur surgical mesh devices in October 2013. Atrium hernia mesh multidistrict litigation (MDL No. 2753; In Re: Atrium Medical Corp. C-Qur Mesh Products Liability Litigation) was established by the JPML in December 2016 assigned to the Honorable Landya B. McCafferty in New Hampshire District Court. The first trials for Atrium hernia mesh defects would commence in the late 2019 or early 2020.

As of September 2018, more than 2,300 hernia mesh lawsuits are pending in the federal MDLs targeting Ethicon’s Physiomesh Flexible Composite mesh, Atrium C-Qur products, and C.R. Bard's polypropylene products.