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Monday, October 27, 2003This was a deliberate, for-profit fad. The tort liability bar proved again that it knows how to exploit modern sensibilities to stoke fears of disease, raise hopes of a cash windfall and shape expectations of a national jury pool. In this it had the considerable assistance of the Ralph Nader empire; his "Public Citizen" sold information kits directly to breast-implant lawyers. In 1988, Mr. Nader and Sidney Wolfe, head of his Public Citizen Health Research Group, started to lobby for regulation of the implants, which had been used by some two million women over 30 years. Soon trial lawyers convened a Breast Implant Litigation Group; one San Jose firm invested $3 million of its own capital in filing some 90 lawsuits. In December 1991, San Francisco lawyer Don Bolton won a $7.3 million jury verdict for a plaintiff who alleged that her implants had caused an autoimmune disease, despite testimony by her own doctors that she had symptoms before the implants. In January 1992, FDA commissioner David Kessler called for a moratorium on the implants, citing no scientific study but the Bolton verdict. As early as June 1992, Dr. Marcia Angell, executive editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, published an editorial denouncing the ban. A survey of the matchless epidemiological records at the Mayo Clinic found no association between implants and autoimmune diseases. Both Dr. Angell and Mayo researcher Dr. Sherine E. Gabriel were rewarded with a barrage of subpoenas from tort lawyers. posted by Sydney on 10/27/2003 06:30:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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