Wyeth & Pfizer Unit Must Pay $27M In Hormone Case
Make a commentBy Ed Silverman // March 6th, 2008 // 5:54 pm
A federal jury says Wyeth and Pfizer’s Upjohn unit must pay more than $27 million to a Little Rock, Arkansas, woman who contracted breast cancer after taking their hormone replacement meds, the Associated Press reports.
The jury ruled today that Donna Scroggin should receive $19.3 million from Wyeth and $7.7 million from Upjohn in punitive damages. Jurors ruled in favor of Scroggin last month and decided that Wyeth inadequately warned her that its Premarin and Prempro drugs carried an increased risk of breast cancer. The lawsuit also named Upjohn, which made Provera. Wyeth plans to appeal.
The Prempro lawsuits have yielded mixed results. Another Little Rock woman, Helene Rush, lost her case against Wyeth last year and a federal appeals court upheld that decision in February. A federal jury in Little Rock also ruled for Wyeth in 2006 in the first in a series of lawsuits against the New Jersey drug maker.
An Ohio woman was initially awarded $3 million in a case in Pennsylvania, though a judge later overturned the award. In Reno, Nevada, jurors awarded $134 million to three women, but a judge in February cut that to about $58 million total - $23 million in compensatory and $35 million in punitive damages. The Nevada judgment is the largest award to date against the drugmaker, which faces about 5,300 lawsuits in state and federal courts.