Quoted from http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-04-20/pfizer-ordered-to-pay-4-million-in-damages-in-prempro-case
Pfizer Ordered to Pay $4 Million in Damages in Prempro Case
By Jef Feeley on April 20, 2012Pfizer Inc. (PFE) must pay at least $4 million in damages to a woman who developed breast cancer after taking the company’s Prempro menopause drug, a jury in Connecticut ruled.
Jurors in federal court in New Haven ruled April 18 that Pfizer’s Wyeth unit was liable for causing Margaret Fraser’s cancer and that Prempro was an “unreasonably dangerous product,” Greg Bubalo, one of Fraser’s lawyers, said in a telephone interview today. The panel also found Wyeth should pay punitive damages over its handling of the drug, he said.
The jury concluded that Wyeth’s handling of the drug “was reckless and they had misrepresented the risks and benefits of its drug to patients and doctors,” Bubalo said. A federal judge will decide later how much in punitive damages Pfizer must pay, he said.
More than 6 million women took Prempro and related 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 release of the Women’s Health Initiative, a National Institutes of Health-sponsored study.