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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

MONTH: November 2006

Wyeth wins mistrial to end second Premarin case

 

Philadelphia Common Pleas Court Judge Norman Ackerman on October 11, 2006 declared a mistrial in the first phase of a scheduled two-part trial in which Jennie Nelson, 66, of Dayton, Ohio, contended that she developed breast cancer in 2001 as result of taking the Wyeth hormone drug Prempro for about five years.

PremPro is a combination of progestin and Premarin, a brand name derived from "pregnant mare's urine." Producing Premarin requires keeping mares pregnant, breeding a constant surplus of foals, many of whom are sold to slaughter. Under boycott by animal advocacy groups worldwide since shortly after ANIMAL PEOPLE published investigative findings by the Canadian Farm Animal Concerns Trust in April 1993, Premarin was still the top-selling prescription drug worldwide in 2001, but sales plummeted after the Women's Health Initiative study funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health in July 2002 determined that the Premarin component of PremPro appears to be associated with increased risk from heart attacks, strokes, and blood clots forming in the lungs.

Ackerman sealed the reason for his mistrial ruling. The mistrial declaration erased a jury award to Nelson of $1.5 million one week earlier, and cancelled the second phase of the trial. The jury verdict came just hours after Ackerman replaced one juror with an alternate, after the original jury deliberated for six days. The jury then found probable cause to believe that taking PremPro contributed to Nelson's illness, and that she had suffered $1.5 million damages. Whether Wyeth was actually liable for the damages, by reason of negligence, was to have been the subject of the second trial phase.

Wyeth on September 15, 2006 won the first of about 4,500 pending lawsuits from former estrogen supplement users, when a federal jury in Little Rock, Arkansas, ruled that Linda Reeves, 67, had ignored precautionary warnings sold with the supplements. Reeves took Premarin, progestin, and the combined Premarin/progestin drug PremPro for at least five years before discovering in 2000 that she had breast cancer.

Wyeth and a third plaintiff, Carol McCreary, 59, of Reno, announced on October 4 that they had reached an out of court settlement, on the eve of going to trial. The terms were not disclosed.
Between 4,500 and 14,000 similar cases are pending, according to conflicting reports.