Quoted from http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-06-18/pfizer-faces-trial-over-hormone-drug-as-200-cases-sent-back-to-home-courts.html
Pfizer Faces Trials in 200 Suits Over Hormone-Drugs
By Jef Feeley - Jun 18, 2010
Pfizer Inc. faces a Texas trial over its hormone-replacement drugs after a court overseeing lawsuits over the medicines sent 200 cases back to their home courts.
A judge in Galveston, Texas, last week set a May 2011 trial date for Karen Zahn’s claims against Pfizer’s Wyeth unit. Zahn says in her suit that the Prempro menopause drug helped cause her breast cancer. It’s one of the first of more than 8,000 lawsuits over the medicine consolidated in federal court in Arkansas to be returned for trial, plaintiffs’ lawyers said.
U.S. District Judge William Wilson in Little Rock, Arkansas, is supervising pretrial proceedings in the cases against Wyeth and Pharmacia & Upjohn, another Pfizer unit. He returned the 200 cases to their courts in March and told lawyers to get another 400 ready to be sent back later this year.
“Pfizer is now going to have to gear up and hire lawyers all over the country to try these cases,” said Carl Tobias, a professor at the University of Richmond law school who teaches classes on mass-tort law. “That makes things more expensive and may provide some incentive to settle.”
More than 6 million women took the menopause drugs to treat symptoms such as 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, topped $2 billion before the Women’s Health Initiative study concluded they posed an increased breast-cancer risk.