Steve GannCounty Sues Avandia Drug Maker
March 4th 2010 03:52
The suit is the first governmental prosecution over Avandia in California, said Tamara Lange, lead deputy county counsel for Santa Clara.
Assisting the Santa Clara County counsel's office in the litigation are Beverly Hills firm Kiesel, Boucher & Larson and two Houston firms: Woodfill & Pressler and Williams Kherkher Hart Boundas.
A GlaxoSmithKline spokeswoman said the company hadn't seen the complaint, and that it expected it to be transferred to the coordinated proceedings, along with class actions seeking Avandia refunds, before Judge Cynthia Rufe in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.
The company "believes that the cases have no substantive merit, and are not appropriate for class action status," she said. "Consistent with the FDA-approved labeling, the scientific evidence simply does not establish that Avandia increases cardiovascular ischemic risk or causes myocardial ischemic events."
A U.S. Senate report on the diabetes drug Avandia says both the manufacturer, GlaxoSmithKline, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration should have warned patients about the dangers of the drug years before they did. The report recommends taking Avandia off the market.
In 2007, Dr. Steven Nissen published a study showing that those taking Avandia had a 43 percent higher risk of having a heart attack and a 64 percent greater chance of dying from a heart attack than those not taking the drug. "We've been warning about this for two and a half years," he said. "There really isn't a good reason for physicians to continue to prescribe the drug. It's time to get it off the market."
It's just a matter of time before we start seeing the class action lawsuits like we did with Vioxx, Crestor, Zyprexa, and Yaz.
There is a lot of pressure put on the FDA to approve new drug therapies by patient groups and manufacturers. It costs millions to produce a new drug and years of clinical testing to get the drug to market.
One of the biggest problems that we have in America is the DTC( direct to consumer) marketing of medications. The US is the only country that allows this. Thousands of ads hit the airwaves and magazines to coincide with the drug's market entry. The ads work as pressure put on by patients, who want the latest and greatest drug, lead to the newer drug being prescribed by the physician. So we are sending thousands of scripts out when really we know the least about this drug, as compared to others who have been on the market for years.
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