Pennsylvania Personal Injury Blog

A Philadelphia jury awarded $2.5 million to a woman from Bensalem. The jury found that Paxil had caused heart problems in her 3-year-old son who required several surgeries after his birth to fix his heart. They ruled out additional punitive damages.

The case was the first of about 600 lawsuits to go to trial on claims that the GlaxoSmithKline’s Paxil antidepressant caused birth defects in children whose mothers took the drug during pregnancy.

According to an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer, legal experts saw the 10-2 jury decision as a big win for plaintiffs in the remaining cases, even though the jurors awarded only compensatory damages.

Jurors linked the plaintiff’s problems to Paxil and said GlaxoSmithKline was negligent in not properly warning the woman’s doctor of the drug’s risk. They did not find the company’s behavior “outrageous,” which would have been necessary to award punitive damages.

The standard for finding punitive damages requires evidence that a company knew about problems but ignored them or covered them up because the product was so profitable.

Continue reading "First Paxil Lawsuit Results in Plaintiff's Favor" »

On September 15, an attorney told a Philadelphia jury that GlaxoSmithKline P.L.C. ignored evidence for years that its antidepressant Paxil may have caused birth defects. According to an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer, this attorney represents a woman who says that taking the drug during her pregnancy caused her three year-old son’s heart problems.

The Bucks County resident, a former cheerleader for the Philadelphia 76ers, is making the claim for her son who appeared briefly in the courtroom this morning. According to her attorney, Glaxo told its scientists to avoid disclosing possible risks associated with the drug’s use by pregnant women.

An attorney for GlaxoSmithKline is claiming there is no evidence that Paxil caused the child’s heart problems. The case is being heard in Common Pleas Court.

The woman’s attorney showed the jury a series of documents that showed that Glaxo knew before Paxil went on the market that rats administered the drug were more likely to have pups that didn’t survive past four days and that the rate of death increased with higher doses of Paxil.

In the late 1980s, at about the same time as the rat study, an internal Glaxo scientist warned that “there remains the possibility that this compound could be teratogenic (meaning can cause birth defects) at higher dose levels.”

The trial is the first of more than 600 cases alleging that Glaxo knew Paxil caused birth defects and hid those risks to pump up profits. Approved for U.S. use in 1992, the drug generated about $942 million in sales last year, 2.1 percent of Glaxo’s total sales.

Continue reading "Trial Opens in Philadelphia in Paxil Lawsuit" »