2015 Ends Well for Transvaginal Mesh Victims

Philadelphia, PAJohnson & Johnson last week was hit with a $12.5 million verdict in a transvaginal mesh lawsuit that includes $7 million in punitive damages. Of the several TVM mesh manufacturers, J&J has been the worst for settling, even though it faces the most federal lawsuits.

The drug giant in 2014 won the first bellwether case against it after a five-day trial, whereas this latest trial lasted two-and-a-half weeks. J&J said it will appeal and it still continues to contest liability.

In this most recent lawsuit, 65-year-old Patricia Hammons, a Walmart shelf stocker from Indiana, claimed that she could no longer have sex and suffered from other health problems, including incontinence, which the mesh was supposed to fix. Her case was severe: the mesh had caused the perforation of her bladder and she required several surgeries to remove the mesh.

In 2013, a New Jersey jury awarded a woman with a Prolift insert $11.1 million in damages, including $7.76 in punitive damages. Both juries found that J&J did not properly warn women of the risks and marketed an unsafe product. In the trial ending last week, damning evidence came from J&J managers, physicians and J&J employees who worked on development of the Prolift.

According to philly.com, a J&J official testified that the company had $108 million in Prolift sales from the time the product was launched in 2005 until it was taken off the market in 2012, following thousands of complaints from women who had the implants. And even before the Prolift launch, J&J knew its mesh product had been associated with pain during sex. But it chose not to include that information on the product warning label.

Scott Ciarrocca, head of Research & Development for Ethicon (and who testified at the Linda Gross v. Ethicon trial in 2013) said that “the company had never given any thought to how to remove the mesh if it caused problems.” No wonder mesh removal wasn’t an issue during R&D: Ciarrocca, working with a French transvaginal mesh team, was tasked in taking the Prolift to market. The French TVM team only worked on cadavers to train on mesh procedure. (According to his profile on LinkedIn, Ciarrocca is still the director of R&D at Ethicon.)

And more damning evidence came from one of the plaintiff’s experts, who described the transvaginal mesh procedure “as exceedingly difficult” and tantamount to a surgical “train wreck.”

Hammons is one of approximately 180 women with similar complaints who have filed suit against J&J and its Ethicon unit in Philadelphia courts. Additionally, the company is facing thousands and thousands of lawsuits nationwide and in Canada. If J&J does not announce soon that it is working toward any settlements, 2016 might not be a good year for the company.