A grieving mother is blaming the Yaz birth control pill for her daughter’s death. Joan Cummins of Hackettstown, New Jersey, has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Bayer Corporation, the maker of Yaz. Michelle Pfleger, 18 years old and a freshman at Elon University in North Carolina, died as a result of a pulmonary embolism, […]
A grieving mother is blaming the <"https://www.yourlawyer.com/topics/overview/YAZ">Yaz birth control pill for her daughter’s death. Joan Cummins of Hackettstown, New Jersey, has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Bayer Corporation, the maker of Yaz.
Michelle Pfleger, 18 years old and a freshman at Elon University in North Carolina, died as a result of a pulmonary embolism, a blood clot in the lungs, in March 2010. Michelle was prescribed Yaz for the treatment of acne. Her mother’s wrongful death lawsuit claims that Yaz is a dangerous prescription drug sold without adequate warnings about the risks of serious and fatal injuries.
More than 6,000 lawsuits have been filed in the U.S. over Yaz, as well as Yasmin, a similar birth control pill also made by Bayer. Many of these Yaz and Yasmin lawsuits have been consolidated in the Yasmin and Yaz (Drospirenone) Marketing, Sales Practices and Products Liability Litigation in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Illinois before Judge David R. Herndon (MDL No. 2100).
As we’ve reported in the past, contraceptives like Yaz, Yasmin, Ocella, Gianvi and Zarah contain a synthetic form of progestin called drospirenone that may pose a higher risk of blood clots compared to oral contraceptives made with levonorgestrel, an older form of progestin. Recently, two new studies published in the British Medical Journal found that women who took Yaz, Yasmin and the other drospirenone-containing pills faced a twofold to threefold increased risk of nonfatal blood clots compared to women who took levonorgestrel based contraceptives. At least four other studies have found an association between such medications and pulmonary embolisms and deep vein thrombosis.
Yaz and Yasmin have both been associated with these types of side effects. For example, Adverse Events reported to the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) include 993 cases of pulmonary embolism (blood clots in the lungs), 487 of deep vein thrombosis (clots in the deep veins), and 229 of other blood clots in women who used either the Yaz or Yasmin birth control pill, both made by Bayer.
According to Bayer Dangers, a coalition based in Germany that monitors the company’s behavior, U.S. deaths among users of the Yaz and Yasmin birth control pills have exceeded 190. It is unclear how many of these may or may not be directly related to the victims’ use of Yaz or Yasmin.
