Drug company Wyeth pays big for causing breast cancer

Wyeth officials say their hormone replacement therapy Prempro is not the cause of one Ohio woman's breast cancer. But two jury decisions prove otherwise.

The first jury, in October, awarded Jennie Nelson and her husband $1.5 million in compensatory damages, validating Nelson's claim that her breast cancer -- resulting in a double mastectomy, chemotherapy, and radiation -- was caused by the Prempro she took for six years. When this verdict was ... Full Story »

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4.7
by Bonnie Britt - Feb. 21, 2007

This is an important story and it is not obvious why it did not receive more attention except to observe that some mainstream publications play follow the leader in promoting fluff rather than stories that maybe critical of their advertisers. While the Cancer Blog got it right, I would have preferred to see links to news stories confirming the trial's outcome in the Cancer Blog report. The Cancer Blog, however, correctly reported the outcome whereas law.com got it inexplicably wrong at this link http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1171533777484. Other links support the reporting of what the Cancer Blog reports, such as http://www.news-medical.net/?id=22074 and http://www.northjersey.com/page.php?qstr=eXJpcnk3ZjczN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXkyOSZmZ2JlbDdmN3ZxZWVFRXl5NzA4MDk2MCZ5cmlyeTdmNzE3Zjd2cWVlRUV5eTI= According to a recent article in Newsday, "Many women abandoned Wyeth's hormone replacement drugs, Premarin, and Prempro, after 2002. Studies linked Prempro to increased breast cancer and heart attack risks while Premarin was associated with risks of stroke. Annual sales of the drugs, which reached $2 billion worldwide at their peak, were half that in 2006. (( http://www.newsday.com/business/ny-bzpris215102559feb21,0,1919930.story?coll=ny-business-print )) It was reported http://www.sptimes.com/2007/02/20/Southpinellas/Tormented_first_by_hi.shtml that ABC's Good Morning America telephoned a 15-year-old girl with hiccups 57 times on Sunday morning to persuade her to hiccup on TV. If ABC News had devoted a few of those calls to this topic, it would have been a public service to the tens of thousands of women still taking this drug.

(12 answers)

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