Quoted from http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-15/pfizer-has-settled-about-half-of-prempro-cases-adds-to-reserve.html
Pfizer Has Settled About Half of Prempro Cases, Adds to Reserve
By Jef Feeley - Dec 15, 2011 8:38 AM ET
Pfizer Inc. (PFE), the world’s largest drugmaker, has settled almost half of the lawsuits over its menopause drugs and increased the funds set aside to resolve the cases, the company said in a regulatory filing.
Pfizer and its Wyeth and Pharmacia & Upjohn units have resolved about 46 percent of suits that claimed the companies’ hormone-replacement medicines, including Prempro and Premarin, caused breast cancer, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission filing. Pfizer said it added $68 million to the $772 million it already reserved for the cases.
“We have recorded a charge of $260 million in the first nine months of 2011 that provides for the minimum expected costs to resolve all the remaining hormone-replacement actions,” Pfizer officials said in the Nov. 10 filing.
More than 6 million women took Prempro and related menopause drugs to treat symptoms including hot flashes and mood swings before a 2002 study highlighted their links to cancer. Wyeth’s sales of the medicines, which are still on the market, exceeded $2 billion before the release of the Women’s Health Initiative study sponsored by the National Institutes of Health.
Until 1995, many menopausal women combined Wyeth’s Premarin, an estrogen-based drug, with progestin-laden Provera, made by Pfizer’s Upjohn unit, to relieve their symptoms. Wyeth combined the two hormones in its Prempro pill. Pfizer, based in New York, acquired Wyeth in 2009.
