Quoted from http://www.lehighvalleylive.com/warren-county/index.ssf?/base/news-3/1288497956223520.xml&coll=3
Mother of the late Michelle Pfleger asserts contraceptive contributed to her daughter's death
Sunday, October 31, 2010 By TOM QUIGLEY and kurt bresswein
The Express-Times
INDEPENDENCE TWP. | Township resident Joan Cummins claims the cause of her daughter's sudden death is not as simple as an obstructed blood vessel.
She believes the use of the oral contraceptive Yaz contributed to the death of her daughter, 18-year-old Michelle A. Pfleger, and plans to sue the drug's manufacturer, Bayer HealthCare Pharmaceuticals Inc.
"She was on Yaz birth control for acne," Cummins said. "All you have to do is Google that and look at all the lawsuits."
The freshman teen at Elon University collapsed Sept. 24 as she walked to a morning class. She was pronounced dead a short time later at a nearby hospital. The North Carolina Office of the Chief Medical Examiner attributed her death to a pulmonary thromboemboli, or obstruction of a blood vessel in the lung.
Bayer in April, in agreement with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, updated its labels for Yaz and Yasmin to warn of "the relative risk of developing venous thrombosis," or blockage in a vein.
The day before Pfleger died, a physician treated her with an analgesic for a knee problem, according to the autopsy report.
"There's just really no reason that a healthy young woman who had a knee injury would have developed this," Cummons said of the fatal obstruction.
The North Carolina medical examiner takes note of the knee injury but does not link it to Pfleger's death. The report never mentions Yaz.
Joan Cummins said her daughter was healthy.
"She was 18 years old, completely healthy, at college, with the world at her fingertips," Cummins said.