Beasley, Allen, Crow, Methvin, Portis & Miles, P.C.

Drug giant Bayer is not at all happy that a former Food and Drug Administration (FDA) chief has been tapped to testify against the drug company in a multidistrict litigation (MDL) focusing on the safety of Bayer’s top-selling birth control pills, Yaz. Former FDA commissioner Dr. David Kessler recently submitted an expert report claiming that an FDA advisory committee vote on the pills was tainted because some members of the panel were paid consultants for Bayer and posed an obvious conflict of interest.

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A new study backs up concerns of previous studies that show birth control pills containing the hormone drospirenone, such as Yaz and Yasmin, are more likely to cause deadly blood clots than oral contraceptives made with older generation hormones.

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Lawyers for the pharmaceutical giant Bayer are overwhelmed by the “overly burdensome discovery requests” made by attorneys for the thousands of women and their family members who have filed suit against Bayer. The drug company has turned over some 40 million pages of documents related to Yaz and Yasmin’s warnings, safety, labeling and sales and market, and say they have up to 30 million more pages yet to surrender. Bayer’s attorneys have asked for a protective order to stop the mountain of paperwork, but the plaintiffs attorneys say they want all the documents as they are imperative to the lawsuit filed against the drug company.

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Carole Ann Grohan says she never knew taking Yaz birth control pills could put her life at risk. Instead, the New Jersey woman bought into the flashy commercials about how the oral contraceptive helped clear complexions and protected women from the nasty side effects of premenstrual syndrome (PMS).

Carole Ann wasn’t the only woman swayed by the playful advertisements – Yaz soon became the best selling birth control pill in the nation. However, Carole Ann found out the hard way that women like her were being fooled by Bayer Healthcare, the makers of Yaz. She suffered a blood clot in her lungs, known as a pulmonary embolism.

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Lawyers suing Bayer over the popular birth control pills Yaz and Yasmin have convinced Multi District Judge David Herndon to revise a previously negotiated privacy ruling in their favor. The new ruling, handed down on Sept. 22, prohibited the drug company from editing sales strategy information about contraceptives similar to Yaz and Yasmin in documents that it was required to deliver to plaintiffs. Workers must now pore through more than 30 million pages of information, find each redaction, and determine the reason why the document was altered.

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A Virginia woman has filed a lawsuit against the makers of Yaz birth control pill, claiming the oral contraceptive damaged her gallbladder and drove her to attempt suicide. Megan M. Stewart, 21, filed the 11-count complaint against Bayer Corporation last month, adding to the more than 1,000 lawsuits filed against the pharmaceutical company by women who allege they were not adequately warned of the risks involved with taking Yaz, also known as Yasmin and Ocella.

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More than 50 women in Indiana are suing Bayer Healthcare Pharmaceuticals Inc., the makers of Yaz, Yasmin and its generic brand Ocella, claiming the birth control pills caused them heart attacks and strokes. The women are among hundreds across the country who say they were not appropriately warned of the risk of serious adverse events associated with the drugs.

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The Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation in Washington D.C. has chosen the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of Illinois in East St. Louis to handle multidistrict litigation for what could be as many as 25,000 Yaz lawsuits. Chief Judge David Herndon will preside over the pre-trial proceedings, which have been filed by plaintiffs in all parts of the country against Bayer, the manufacturer of the popular oral contraceptive.

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A 30-year-old mother of three has joined the hundreds of women who have filed lawsuits against Bayer HealthCare, alleging that her use of the birth-control pill Yaz caused her to develop life-threatening blood clots in her left leg.

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Attorneys representing women who have been seriously harmed by Yaz expect that the number of lawsuits against Bayer will escalate dramatically in the coming years, possibly involving thousands of plaintiffs. A 41-year-old writer from Bethesda, Maryland, who is one of the most recent plaintiffs to file a lawsuit against Bayer, recently described her experience taking the drug to the Washington Times.

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