|
More Ortho Evra® News
Ortho Evra® user, Kristin Ribakusky-Templin noticed that the pain that started two weeks earlier as a dull ache was getting worse and now it was shooting down her left leg preventing her from walking.
The Morris County College student headed to an emergency room where physicians discovered multiple blood clots deep in the veins of her leg and lungs. The culprit, doctors later told her was the Ortho Evra® birth control patch that she had been using for less than two months.
"I was really afraid I was going to die," said Templin. "The doctors kept coming in not knowing what was wrong."
Ortho Evra® manufacturer Ortho-McNeil has been sued by many women in the past nine months arguing that the birth control patch causes blood clots,stroke, and death.
Ortho Evra® lawsuits, 37 in total, have been filed in U.S. District Court in Newark, N.J. The Ortho Evra® lawsuits are hauntingly similar:
- An otherwise healthy Georgia woman developed a pulmonary embolism after using Ortho Evra®
- A Maine woman suffers from a blood clot in her right lung after using the Ortho Evra® patch
- A 12-year-old girl in Indiana is diagnosed with deep-vein thrombosis after using the Ortho Evra® birth control patch.
For many of the women, the long-term effects have been overwhelming. Some will be on blood thinners for the rest of their lives. Others, like Templin, say they have become clinically depressed and confined to the couch.
Debra Roinestad said she switched to Ortho Evra® after her diaphragm became uncomfortable. Fourteen months later, Roinestad was spending the day with her husband when she felt a pain in her chest. She headed to the hospital where doctors found two blood clots in her chest and told her she was going into cardiac arrest.
Roinestad survived but her life was destroyed, she said. She dropped out of school and her doctor told her she can not have children.
Ortho Evra® lawsuits contend that Ortho-McNeil rushed the patch onto the market without adequate testing.
At a hearing last week in U.S. District Court in Ohio, where the federal Ortho Evra® cases have been consolidated, a Johnson & Johnson attorney announced the company hopes to settle the lawsuits. Already, 11 women who filed suit in Hudson County have received settlements, although the amounts are sealed.
Reference:
"Birth-control patch linked to blood clots, strokes," Knight Ridder, Amy Klein, May 2006.
|
