Dr Shezad Malik Law Firm has offices based in Fort Worth and Dallas and represents people who have suffered catastrophic and serious personal injuries including wrongful death, caused by the negligence or recklessness of others. We specialize in Personal Injury trial litigation and focus our energy and efforts on those we represent.
If you take antidepressants such as fluoxetine (marketed as Prozac) early in your pregnancy, you may be doubling the risk that your newborn will be born with a heart defect, according to a new study.
However, the vast majority of children born to women who take such antidepressants – known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) – do not have such defects, the researchers are quick to note.
The Institute of Medicine will study a U.S. Food and Drug administration program that gives fast-track approval to certain medical devices.
Consumer watchdog groups, lawmakers and others have criticized the FDA for using the accelerated approval process for more products than Congress originally intended, leading to problems with devices after they are sold.
Expedited reviews of devices shown to be similar to existing products allow companies to get products to market more quickly and with less expense.
The study of the program by the institute, part of the National Academies, was required by a 2007 law, but the FDA said on Wednesday that the results would not come until March of 2011.
A Santa Clara County jury this week awarded a former college student more than $49 million in damages, finding that two truckers and state transportation officials were to blame for a 2007 accident on Highway 152 that left him permanently brain damaged.
In one of the county’s largest personal injury verdicts in years, the jury sided with plaintiff Drew Bianchi, a 23-year-old Bakersfield man whose attorney presented evidence during a five-week trial that reckless driving by truckers on the perilous Pacheco Pass cost him a chance to go to medical school and left him needing round-the-clock medical care for the rest of his life.
Before the trial, the California Department of Transportation also agreed to pay Bianchi $10 million to settle claims against the state that were based on allegations that steps were not taken for years to correct safety issues on Highway 152.
One trucking company settled with Bianchi for $2 million, bringing total damages in the case to more than $60 million.
Merck & Co. is paying claims by the families of more than 3,100 users of its Vioxx painkiller who died of heart attacks or strokes blamed on the drug, according to a law firm administering a $4.85 billion settlement fund.
The fund will pay about 3,000 claims for heart attack deaths and at least 122 strokes, according to BrownGreer LLP, a claims administrator appointed by both sides. Merck introduced Vioxx in 1999 and withdrew it in 2004 when a study showed the drug doubled the risk of heart attacks and strokes. Merck set up the fund, which covers claims of death and lesser injuries, in 2007 after reserving $1.9 billion to fight 26,600 Vioxx suits.
New studies point to an increased risk of Paxil birth defects in babies whose mothers use the antidepressant during pregnancy.
According to the findings of two studies, women who were taking Paxil during their first trimester were one and a half to two times more likely to have a baby with a heart defect than women who were taking other antidepressants or women of the general population.
A later study found that women who took Paxil at 20 weeks or later were six times more likely to have a baby with a rare birth defect known as persistent pulmonary hypertension, or PPHN.
Bayer AG, Germany’s largest drugmaker, said its Yaz contraceptive is part of an investigation by a Swiss health regulator into the death of a young woman who took the pill.
The Swissmedic agency and an investigative judge are looking into the case of the woman, who died from the effects of pulmonary embolism, Bayer’s Swiss health unit said in a statement posted on its Web site yesterday. Bayer is cooperating with the authorities, the company said.
As Reported in the NY Times. Read the full article here.
The oral contraceptives Yaz and Yasmin are the top-selling pharmaceutical line for Bayer HealthCare, largely as a result of marketing that presents them as much more than mere pregnancy prevention.
Yaz, in particular, the top-selling birth control pill in the United States, owes much of its popularity to multimillion-dollar ad campaigns that have promoted the drug as a quality-of-life treatment to combat acne and severe premenstrual depression.
A faint rotten-egg smell drifts off a covered lagoon a hundred yards from a well-traveled Missouri gravel road.
This is battleground — ground zero in what some see as a high-stakes fight for the future of Missouri agriculture.
But in Kansas City law offices 80 miles away, combatants prepare for another showdown over the smells drifting from this 80,000-head hog operation.
Is the stench an obnoxious affront to neighbors or simply the “odor of agriculture” that comes with life in the country?
In 2003, GSK initiated a retrospective analysis of women, dating back to 1995, who had taken antidepressants in the first trimester of their pregnancies and had given birth to children with major congenital malformations. The study found an association between Paxil and congenital malformations in mothers taking Paxil in the first trimester.
Another study conducted by researchers in Denmark and published in Pharmacoepidemology and Drug Safety in 2005 showed a more than 2-fold increase for congenital malformations in women taking Paxil compared to other antidepressants.
In September 2005, GSK sent out a “Dear Doctor” letter informing physicians throughout the United States that the results of its analysis showed a higher rate of “congenital malformations associated with the use of Paxil as compared to other antidepressants” in infants born to women taking antidepressants during the first trimester of pregnancy.
The FDA has issued three Public Health Advisories since December 2005 concerning the risk of congenital heart defects and has changed Paxil’s pregnancy category from C to D, which indicates that “[t]here is positive evidence of fetal risk.”
Switzerland’s medicines supervisor has said it will investigate allegations an oral contraceptive contributed to a fatal lung embolism in a woman.
The embolism occurred ten months after the woman starting taking Yaz birth control pills produced by German firm Bayer. She died in mid-September. Swissmedic announced on Friday it would look into suspicions of a possible link.
Bayer could not comment on the case but said it would take any possible link seriously. It expressed sympathy with the woman’s family, saying her death was tragic regardless of whether there was a connection to its contraceptive pill.
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