A plaintiff from Tennessee is suing Ethicon and Johnson & Johnson over medical expenses and injuries she suffered after being implanted with pelvic mesh.
According to the Ethicon pelvic mesh lawsuit, plaintiff Betty B. was implanted with the mesh at the Physicians Regional Medical Center in Knoxville, Tenn. The pelvic mesh the plaintiff was implanted with was manufactured by Johnson & Johnson and Ethicon.
Ethicon pelvic mesh is used by surgeons to help repair patient’s pelvic floors. However, the Ethicon pelvic mesh lawsuit alleges that the companies responsible for making and distributing the medical product deliberately manipulated the research to hide risks from the public. As a result, doctors and patients were not aware of the risks of Ethicon pelvic mesh.
“Defendants had a legal duty to insure the safety and effectiveness of their pelvic mesh products by conducting adequate and well controlled studies on their products prior to marketing,” alleges the complaint. “Defendants deliberately chose to manipulate the only studies that were conducted on their products and by so doing provided doctors and patients with false and misleading information about the safety and effectiveness of their pelvic mesh products.”
“Furthermore, Defendants made a conscious decision to forego performing studies and creating registries that would have provided doctors and patients in the United States with accurate information regarding the lack of proof of the safety and effectiveness of their pelvic mesh products.”
According to the Ethicon pelvic mesh lawsuit, medical device manufacturers including the defendants developed and sold a variety of pelvic mesh products from 2002 through 2015. The products were meant to teat medical conditions of the female pelvis, including pelvic organ prolapse and stress urinary incontinence.
Surgical mesh, says the plaintiff, has been around since the 1950s to repair abdominal hernias. However, the Ethicon pelvic mesh and other products developed by the defendants used a different substance, polypropylene mesh. Despite manufacturers claims that the substance was inert, patients began experiencing serious adverse reactions after being implanted with the Ethicon and other polypropylene meshes, alleges the lawsuit.
“he scientific evidence shows that this mesh material is biologically incompatible with human tissue and promotes an immune response in a large subset of the population receiving Defendants’ Pelvic Mesh Products,” the Ethicon pelvic mesh lawsuit states.
Betty claims that although research has shown that the polypropylene mesh causes severe side effects, the companies aggressively marketed the material. The defendants, say the plaintiff, “intentionally, recklessly and/or negligently concealed, suppressed, omitted, and misrepresented the risks, dangers, defects, and disadvantages of the Pelvic Mesh Products and advertised, promoted, marketed, sold and distributed the Pelvic Mesh Products as a safe medical device when, in fact, Defendants knew that the Pelvic Mesh Products were not safe for their intended purposes and that the Pelvic Mesh Products would cause, and did cause, serious medical problems, and in some patients, catastrophic and permanent injuries.”
In fact, alleges the Ethicon pelvic mesh lawsuit, the Food and Drug Administration has issued safety warnings about the mesh after receiving thousands of complaints.. The FDA has noted that the material can contract, retract or shrink, causing vaginal pain and sometimes requiring surgical removal of the mesh.
Betty says that Ethicon and Johnson & Johnson should be held responsible for deceiving doctors and patients about the risks of pelvic mesh and for the increased medical expenses and pain and suffering caused by the product.
If you’ve suffered from transvaginal mesh complications and are interested in filing an Ethicon pelvic mesh lawsuit, contact the attorneys at McDonald Worley for a FREE case review..
