Products Liability
Vaginal Mesh Lawsuits
At one time, lawyers are investigating vaginal mesh and bladder sling lawsuits involving Gynecare Proflift (Ethicon/Johnson & Johnson), Cook Medical and Bard Avaulta vaginal mesh systems.
The purpose of pelvic mesh products is to provide support for prolapsed pelvic organs (POP) and urinary incontinence (SUI) that comes with weakened muscles due to childbirth, age, or other causes. These lawsuits claim the vaginal mesh manufacturers failed to make a safe product.
Overview of Vaginal Mesh Lawsuits
Plaintiffs’ lawyers around the country have filed lawsuits against vaginal mesh manufacturers largely on behalf of women who have already had or will have to undergo surgeries to remove mesh from their pelvic tissue and to treat complications from defects in these mesh products that include pain, infection, incontinence and other urinary problems.
The vast majority of the lawsuits have been filed against two manufacturers of vaginal mesh products: C.R. Bard and Ethicon, a Johnson & Johnson’s subsidiary.
Bard and Ethicon marketed these bladder slings as safe and effective for treating urinary incontinence which lead thousands of doctors to use these products in surgeries to treat the problem. Certainly, in some cases, it did effectively treat SUI. But far too many women had a very different result: vaginal mesh extrusions, infection, and other adverse effects.
These bladder slings did not go through full clinical trials and instead snuck on the market by the Section 510(k) exception that these vaginal mesh implants were substantially equivalent to other similar products already on the market.
In October 2008 and again in February 2009, the FDA expressed concern regarding the safety of these vaginal mesh slings. Plaintiff’s lawyers argue that there should have been a recall at this point, at the very least of the Gynecare Prolift, and Bard Avaulta vaginal mesh products In 2012, the FDA went a little further, pushing Ethicon and C.R. Bard to study the safety of their vaginal mesh products. The phrase “too little, too late” was sometimes made for our FDA.
Eventually, most of these lawsuits reached a settlement. There are no current class action vaginal mesh lawsuits of which our lawyers are currently aware.
The Transvaginal Mesh Lawsuit Claims
Plaintiffs’ lawsuits alleged that contrary to manufacturers representations and heavy marketing, these vaginal mesh implants had a unreasonably high failure, injury and just did not perform as promised, often requiring frequent and often debilitating additional surgeries.
What more is these defendants knew its mesh implants were defective and could cause such things erosion, extrusion, infection, sepsis, dense adhesions, and worsening dyspareunia but did nothing because they were chasing money – the profits for these products were unbelievable. When you consider that the complications from the mesh and from mesh removal are often life-changing and can be irreversible, you appreciate how serious these those allegation were.
Being a Plaintiff in These Lawsuits
If you were a patient who is experiencing complications with one of these products, you were in a tough spot. You had a problem and you thought you solved it. Instead your symptoms have returned and, for many, they were worse now then they were originally.
A lot of women are unconformable bringing a claim. It is easy to say if you are not going through it yourself, but you shouldn’t be. This is a problem that impacts millions of women. Just because people are not talking about this problem at parties, does not mean it is not a widespread problem.
Approximately 50% of women who have had children will suffer some type of prolapse over the course of their lives and nearly 10% of women will need surgery for pelvic organ prolapse. There are women who are very close friends with another woman with the exact same problem and they never know it because they both keep it to themselves.
Many women had viable lawsuits, never filed them, and never got justice.
Our law firm is not handling vaginal mesh lawsuits and we are unaware of any law firms that are in 2021.