GlaxoSmithKline Plc’s scientists were alarmed by a rising number of birth defects among pregnant women taking the antidepressant Paxil in 1997, according to internal documents revealed in a trial in Philadelphia. There was a 13.3 percent rate of incidence for congenital abnormalities as of November 1997, according to the documents…
Doctors should prescribe the birth- control pills that are the least likely to cause blood clots, according to a study of more than 3,000 women published in the British Medical Journal. Oral contraceptives containing levonorgestrel and a low dose of estrogen, such as Bayer AG’s Microgynon 30, were associated with…
Forty years ago, on September 4, 1969, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) declared the new birth control pill to be “safe” for use by women to regulate births. Forty years later, the true safety of oral contraception is still in question. In 1951, steroid biologist Dr. Gregory Goodwin Pincus…
Judge Sandra Mazer Moss, Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas, consolidated all lawsuits filed in Philadelphia that involve Bayer’s popular birth control pills, commonly known as Yaz, and Yasmin. Philadelphia is likely to be the country’s center for state court litigation involving this widely used birth control pill. The lawsuits allege…
– Pfizer Inc., the world’s biggest drugmaker, said a consultant to plaintiffs’ attorneys in lawsuits over its epilepsy drug Neurontin tried to tamper with a prospective witness. Dr. David Egilman, a Brown University medical professor, “improperly contacted” the treating physician of a Massachusetts man whose family claims he killed himself…
Officials of GlaxoSmithKline Plc, the U.K.’s largest drugmaker, said in 2001 that a birth defect in the fetus of a woman taking its Paxil antidepressant likely was linked to the drug, according to court testimony. After analyzing a 2001 e-mail from a Paxil user who aborted her fetus because it…
GlaxoSmithKline Plc, the world’s second-biggest drugmaker, begins a trial in Philadelphia in what may be a test case for more than 600 lawsuits over claims its antidepressant drug Paxil causes birth defects. Patients and their parents claim internal company documents produced for trial show Glaxo failed to warn about the…
Makers of injected promethazine, a sedative also used to treat nausea and vomiting, are being required to put the strongest warning possible on the product because it can cause tissue damage leading to amputation, the Food and Drug Administration said Wednesday. The drug, previously sold by Wyeth Pharmaceuticals Inc. under…
GlaxoSmithKline Plc, the world’s second-biggest drugmaker, withheld birth-defect data tied to its antidepressant drug Paxil from physicians as the number of reports grew, a psychiatrist testified. Doctors seeking information about birth defects linked to Paxil originally got the total numbers of side-effect reports about the issue from Glaxo, Dr. David…
An executive of GlaxoSmithKline Plc, the world’s second-biggest drugmaker, talked about burying negative studies linking its antidepressant drug Paxil to birth defects, according to a company memo introduced at a trial. “If neg, results can bury,” Glaxo executive Bonnie Rossello wrote in a 1997 memo on what the company would…