DALLAS, Feb. 1 /PRNewswire/ -- Monday, U.S. District Court Judge William R. Wilson set the first of 5,000 cases alleging that hormone replacement drugs cause breast cancer for trial in Little Rock, Arkansas on July 31.
Morgan & Weisbrod, L.L.P. represents long-time Little Rock resident Helene Rush, 71, one of thousands of breast cancer victims who have sued Wyeth, Pfizer and other hormone drug manufacturers. Ms. Rush is one of two bellwether plaintiffs whose trials were chosen by Judge Wilson to be set for July 31. The other plaintiff in the first bellwether trial is 67 year-old Arkansas resident Linda Reeves who is represented by Jim Morris, an attorney with the Provost Umphrey law firm in Beaumont, Texas.
Both women allege that combination estrogen/progesterone replacement drugs caused their breast cancer.
Rush began taking hormone replacement therapy in 1989 and stopped in the summer of 1999 after being diagnosed with cancer in her right breast.
The dangers of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) became national headline news in July of 2002 when the National Institutes of Health stopped the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI), a major study of 16,608 women because the group taking a combination of estrogen and progesterone showed: a 26% increased risk of breast cancer; a 22% increased risk of heart disease; a 29% increased risk of heart attack; and a 41% increased risk of stroke, compared with the control group. Since that time, numerous additional studies in the United States and Europe have underscored the risk of HRT, shown the increased risk of breast cancer to be even greater and shown the benefits to be minor by comparison.
“Our position is clear,” said Les Weisbrod, Morgan & Weisbrod, L.L.P.'s managing partner. “For a long time, the makers twisted the science and suppressed the evidence of the true extent of the risk of these drugs while vastly overplaying the benefits.”
Prior to the release of the WHI results, Wyeth’s Prempro was one of the top-selling drugs in the United States with over $1 billion in annual sales. After the WHI study came out, Prempro sales were cut almost in half, according to Weisbrod. Weisbrod said, “Wyeth is now engaged in a major marketing campaign with TV ads touting ‘Go low with Prempro’ in an effort to increase the sales of this dangerous drug which is still on the market. Women should know that for years Wyeth marketed this as a drug doctors should get women on and keep them on for life without ever doing any long-term testing which would have shown the high breast cancer risk for long-term use.”
In addition, Weisbrod says, “It is now clear that Wyeth marketed this drug as having a heart protective benefit when it did not. Moreover, the FDA had not approved Prempro for cardiovascular benefit, so this was illegal, off- label promotion.” According to Weisbrod there were a number of letters from the FDA to Wyeth instructing them to stop this off-label promotion. On February 25, 1991, one FDA letter to Wyeth included the following language: “We view this campaign in is entirety to be a form of extremely insidious hidden persuasion.”
Although the HRT lawsuits have not gotten as much attention as the Vioxx lawsuits, this drug actually may effect more consumers.
The fact that Judge Wilson chose to preside at two of the HRT lawsuits originating within his district is part of a trend in which federal jurists chosen to handle Multi-District Litigation (MDL) take on a few of the cases instead of referring all of them to their districts of origin, according to Weisbrod. This is very similar to the way in which the Vioxx lawsuits are being handled under the consolidated proceedings in the MDL in federal court in New Orleans.
Morgan & Weisbrod, L.L.P.
CONTACT: Megan Duran, +1-214-219-9191, for Morgan & Weisbrod, L.L.P.
