http://www.rednova.com/news/display/?id=151998

A Baltimore woman has filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against half a dozen pharmaceutical companies, claiming she developed breast cancer as a result of taking Prempro and other hormone replacement therapy drugs.

The suit, filed last week in federal district court in Baltimore by Sarah Jones, seeks $30 million in damages on seven counts including negligence, products liability, breach of warranty and fraud.

Baltimore lawyer Robert K. Jenner, who is representing the plaintiff, says he has filed about a dozen such cases since the hormone replacement therapy litigation began in July 2002. Nationally, the multidistrict litigation over Prempro is up to about 3,000 cases, Jenner said.

The companies never ran their own studies to determine the long- term safety [of these drugs,] he said, asserting that dozens of studies have shown them to be dangerous. The companies never explained to the public that the longer women stayed on hormone therapy, the greater the chances of developing breast cancer.

Jones' doctor prescribed hormone therapy drugs (or the generic medroxyprogesterone acetate) in the early 1990s. The drug was then manufactured by all six of the defendants, i.e., the New Jersey- based Wyeth Inc. and Pharmacia & Upjohn; Pennsylvania-based Wyeth Pharmaceuticals Inc.; Pfizer Inc. and Barr Laboratories Inc. of New York; and the Michigan-based Greenstone Ltd. (Pharmacia & Upjohn was absorbed into Pfizer in 2003).

In 1995, Jones' doctor prescribed Wyeth's Prempro, which contains medroxyprogesterone acetate as well as estrogen found in the Wyeth drug Premarin. She took Prempro until March 2002, when she allegedly began bleeding heavily and discontinued use of the drug.

The same month, Jones had an abnormal mammogram and eventually underwent a partial mastectomy.

Plaintiff Sarah Jones was diagnosed with infiltrating, well- differentiated ductal carcinoma, suffered severe conscious pain and suffering, untold physical disfigurement, embarrassment as well as medical expenses, the complaint says.

Patented in the 1940s, Premarin was marketed to women for decades as a replacement for lost estrogen in menopausal women, according to the complaint.

However, following a 1976 study that Premarin use was connected to uterine and endometrial cancer, medroxyprogesterone acetate was eventually added to lower the risks. Wyeth's combination version of estrogen and medroxyprogesterone, Prempro, came out in 1995.

Wyeth over-promoted Prempro, just as it did Premarin, the complaint alleges. The thrust of Wyeth's marketing efforts has been to create a lifelong consumer demand for hormone therapy, and a belief by physicians that the prescription is beneficial to menopausal and post-menopausal patients.

Phone calls to Wyeth Pharmaceuticals and Pfizer were not returned for comment by press time.



Source: The Daily Record (Baltimore)