Still more patients are filing lawsuits against the makers and distributors of the controversial antibiotic Levaquin. According to records, the plaintiffs are alleging “Levaquin-induced tendon injury (involving) the degradation of the tendon tissue, leading to severe and permanent injuries.” This newest round of lawsuits was filed as of July 8 this year, and has resulted in the combined cases of 96 patients, not an insubstantial number considering that settlements for individual medical injury cases can involve hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars.
The basis of the lawsuit once again centers on the claim that information about Levaquin’s risks either is incomplete or poorly presented, failing to accurately stress the danger of toxicity to muscle and connective tissues. The plaintiffs allege that the prescription of Levaquin led to a number of maladies, including outright tendon ruptures, which is a highly painful and potentially crippling affliction, often requiring extensive physical therapy and potential surgery to properly recover from.
The lawsuit further alleges that manufacturer Johnson & Johnson is more than aware of the medicine’s risks, and has taken consistent steps to actually conceal the risk information about Levaquin from the public. The suit mentions a sorting algorithm that J & J introduced which excludes more than 70 percent of Levaquin injury cases. The protocol only mentions patients who have required corrective surgery following a tendon rupture, which doesn’t account for patients who were similarly injured, but only needed a cast or corrective boot of some nature. Additionally, the plaintiffs point to the fact that this same study only focused on one specific type of rupture in the Achilles tendon, and ignored the possibility of tendon toxicity in general.
Levaquin is an antibiotic in the same class of medications as Cipro, a drug that came to increasing popularity following the 2001 Anthrax attacks. It is considered a big-gun medicine to be used in treating the most difficult infections.