FEN-PHEN (prescription appetite suppressant induced PPH or PAH)
Beginning in December 1996, Alex H. MacDonald of our firm undertook leadership of a five-member trial team in the nation's first Fen-Phen pharmaceutical death action, Estate of Mary Linnen vs. American Home Products, et.al. (Middlesex Superior Court, Cambridge, MA).
In April 1998, our Partner, Mr. MacDonald was appointed by the federal court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, overseeing the consolidated national diet pill litigation (MDL [multi-district litigation] #1203 in re Diet Pill Litigation) to the Plaintiff's Discovery and Expert Witness Committees, where he played a key role throughout the 1998 to 2001 period. Those efforts contributed to the successfully negotiated $4 billion global settlement of 200,000 Fen-Phen diet pill claims pending in the federal court MDL. That settlement, judicially approved by the federal court on August 30, 2000, is among the largest mass tort resolutions in United States history.
In the six years since conclusion of the Linnen trial, Mr. MacDonald has been lead trial counsel in over fifty (50) additional primary pulmonary hypertension (PPH) wrongful death cases arising from Fen-Phen pharmaceutical exposure. These PPH cases, in Massachusetts, Texas, Louisiana, Colorado, Kentucky, New York, Utah, Pennsylvania and Illinois, involve litigation widely acknowledged in the trial bar to comprise among the most sophisticated and serious variety of pharmaceutical/products liability litigation. In each PPH case litigated to date, Mr. MacDonald and his colleagues have prevailed on behalf of their clients. The pivotal role played by Mr. MacDonald and the trial team he led in the national Fen-Phen litigation is chronicled in the book Dispensing with the Truth: The Battle over Fen-Phen (St. Martin's Press, 2001) by Alicia Mundy.
On December 5th 2006, our office, representing five (5) women, sued Wyeth, who claim the fen-phen diet combination caused them to develop an often-fatal lung disease at least eight years after they stopped taking the drugs. [READ MORE]
