J&J's Ethicon Ordered To Pay $3.27M In Transvaginal Mesh Suit

The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia ordered J&J subsidiary Ethicon to pay a former patient $3.27 million in damages over her claims that her implanted transvaginal mesh resulted in pelvic pain and other injuries.

After two weeks of trial, federal jurors found Ethicon to be liable for selling defective devices and failing to appropriately warn doctors and patients of risks associated with the devices, Reuters reported. Plaintiff Jo Huskey and her husband had filed the case against Ethicon in 2012, claiming the device — the Gynecare TVT Obturator (TVT-O) for stress urinary incontinence — caused serious side effects within one year of being implanted.

“I think it sends a very clear message to Ethicon that these products and these cases are extremely serious,” Huskey’s lawyer Fidelma Fitzpatrick told Reuters. “These women are very seriously injured from these products.”

According to The West Virginia Record, the amount of damages awarded to Huskey are broken down as follows: “$100,000 in reasonable expenses of necessary medical care in the past; $470,000 for pain and suffering, mental anguish, disability or loss of enjoyment of life; $2.5 million for pain, suffering, mental anguish, disability or loss of enjoyment of life that, in reasonable probability, will be sustained in the future; and $200,000 to fairly compensate Huskey’s husband for loss of consortium.”

“The verdict is disappointing and we believe we have strong grounds for appeal,” Ethicon spokesperson Matthew Johnson wrote in an e-mail response to Bloomberg. “Ethicon’s TVT-O sling was properly designed, and Ethicon acted appropriately and responsibly in the research, development and marketing of the product.”

It was the second guilty verdict handed down to J&J over transvaginal devices. In April, jurors in a Dallas court also deemed the TVT-O device’s design as defective, and ordered the company to pay plaintiff Linda Batiste $1.2 million in damages, Bloomberg reported.

J&J disclosed in a regulatory filing recently that it faces some 30,000 lawsuits in the U.S. over claims that their implants damaged women’s organs and caused pain, bleeding, and other complications. Many of the lawsuits involving J&J and other transvaginal mesh manufacturers have been consolidated before U.S. District Judge Joseph Goodwin in Charleston, West Virginia, according to Bloomberg.

Other manufacturers are also facing thousands of individual lawsuits over their own pelvic mesh products. C.R. Bard lost a $2 million lawsuit in West Virginia federal court in 2013, while Boston Scientific recently won two mesh trials in Massachusetts, Reuters noted.

Meanwhile, Endo International in May decided to avoid litigation by agreeing to settle claims for $830 million.