It wasn’t enough that Bayer Healthcare overwhelmed the oral contraceptive market with its No. 1 selling, $800 million-earning Yaz birth control pill. The powerful drug company is at it again, this time introducing a new oral contraceptive, Natazia.
You could call it a public relations maneuver — Bayer Healthcare’s new website encouraging women to come to them with questions and advice about contraception instead of relying on biased bloggers or the Internet. The unbranded video features blindfolded women handling a rhino and trying to guess what it is. Awkward? Maybe. At the very least, BayerforWomen.com has captured the attention of Medical Marketing & Media. But, what makes Bayer a reliable source for women?
Members of the Oral Contraceptive Over-the-Counter Working Group are advocating to – you guessed it – make birth control pills available for women without a prescription. But it is in the best interest for women when they can carry serious and even life-threatening risks?
Twenty-five California women have joined more than a thousand others across the country in a lawsuit against Bayer HealthCare claiming the company’s blockbuster birth control pills – Yaz and Yasmin – caused them to suffer life threatening health problems such as strokes and blood clots. The defendants say the company was aware its oral contraceptives increased a woman’s chances of serious health problems even more than other birth control pills, yet the company failed to adequately warn women of that risk.
Kathy Perea will not forget the pain she suffered when her gallbladder began to fail. “It was horrible,” the 27-year-old mother of five told KTNV-TV. “I was throwing up so much that the vessels in my eyes were bursting because I was straining myself so bad.”
After a routine flight to visit family in Florida, Sara Golieb’s tendonitis in her leg was growing particularly bothersome for the athletic, 25-year-old. “I had never felt pain like this in my foot or leg,” she wrote in an essay on the National Alliance for Thrombosis & Thrombophilia website. “I knew there was something wrong … in my wildest dreams, I did not think my symptoms could be due to a blood clot.”
Dawn Varrechio, a mother of four, was shocked to discover that her breathing problems were due to blood clots in both of her lungs. But she became angry when she found out her birth control pills were the culprit. “It’s scary to think that at 35, you could be gone, like that quickly,” she told CBS3 News.
Irina Shiryaeva was ecstatic when her family won the “green card lottery,” earning them sought-after immigration papers allowing them to leave their hometown in Russia and move to the United States. But her dream was cut short when she died shortly after arriving in the United States. Irina suffered from a pulmonary embolism, a blood clot in her lungs. Doctors theorized it was the long, nine-hour plane ride coupled with her recent use of birth control pills.
Holly Grigg-Spall, columnist for the UK’s The Independent, says the revolutionary birth control pill had nothing to do with turning her into a women’s health writer and activist. In fact, it gave her something to complain about.
As Bayer HealthCare begins defending itself against a flurry of lawsuits citing health problems over its blockbuster birth control pills Yaz and Yasmin, the drug company announced it has received approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on a new oral contraceptive. Bayer’s Natazia combines the hormones estrogen and progestin in doses that adjust four times throughout a women’s menstruation cycle. Natazia is the first birth control pill to use the four-phase dosing protocol with the added benefit of controlling irregular bleeding better than other pills.
