San Diego Personal Injury Attorney Blog

In 2001, pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline put the asthma prescription drug Advair on the market. Advair was a commercial success, with sales reaching $7.8 billion by 2010. This number is impressive when you consider that Advair is limited as a treatment for asthma and its large array of adverse side effects. Recently, GlaxoSmithKline agreed to pay $3 billion to resolve both criminal and civil charges that it unlawfully promoted and marketed Advair. According to reports, GlaxoSmithKline agreed to counts of misbranding drugs for its labeling of Paxil and Wellbutrin as well. Wellbutrin was marketed to treat people with attention deficit disorder, bipolar disorder, obesity, sexual dysfunction and anxiety disorder, even though it was not shown to safely and effectively treat any of those disorders. The settlement is the largest fraud settlement for a pharmaceutical company in the history of the United States under the False Claims Act. Hopefully, this landmark case…
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Manufacturing errors in the pharmaceutical industry are a real danger. Drug recalls are fairly common in the United States, and usually due to problems with the dosage on the label or adverse reactions after more people use the drug. The Archives of Internal Medicine recently released a study examining FDA reports that concluded in the last eight years, in approximately 20 percent of Class 1 recalls, the FDA did not issue public notifications. When these drugs are determined to be defective or dangerous, the FDA is supposed to notify health care providers through either the Recall Alert System or MedWatch. The report indicated the FDA also fails to give priority to the most serious cases. According to study author Joshua Gagne, an epidemiologist at Brigham And Women’s Hospital, health care providers often lack vital details to appropriately respond to the defective drugs. “[Regulators] need to be better in alerting the…
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