Now that the FDA has decided to set up a special conference on December 8 as a means of investigating the very real instances of blood clots and other health risks associated with Yaz, some people are questioning the sudden urgency behind this decision.
While Yaz and Yasmin, both drosperinone-based, have been linked to countless adverse side effects for years now, the FDA’s sudden need to hold a conference to discuss the matter seems strange. Blood clots have long been linked to drosperinone and Yaz and so have the increased risk of patients suffering from heart attacks, strokes and pulmonary embolisms as a result of those blood clots. However, constant adverse events reports to the FDA and thousands of lawsuits seem to finally have gotten the regulators’ attention only recently.
Perhaps the fact that there are new Yaz lawsuits being filed daily that are starting to list even more dangerous side effects of the controversial oral contraceptives is what swayed regulators. Most recently, one of those plaintiffs was a 28-year-old woman named Carissa Ubersox, who claims that Yaz didn’t just cause her to suffer from multiple pulmonary embolisms — it also put her in a coma and left her blind.
Blindness like Carissa’s is a lesser-known condition blamed on Yaz. The woman was a pediatric nurse who was engaged to be married back in 2007. She started taking Yaz when she saw an ad on TV that basically touted the pill as a cure for everything from acne to severe PMS. Within three months of taking Yaz, she suffered from a blood clot in her legs that eventually made its way to her lungs, causing her to suffer from a double pulmonary embolism. The pulmonary embolisms caused the woman’s heart to stop beating and she was put into a coma. By the time Carissa came to, she was totally blind.
Due to the same ads that Carissa believed, thousands of women began taking Yaz and wound up much like Carissa did. Bayer, the makers of Yaz and its sister drug Yasmin, has continued to stand by the efficacy and safety of the drugs, claiming that the company’s own studies show that Yaz is no more dangerous than other birth control pills that don’t contain drosperinone. The ads of the “miracle pill” have since been corrected to highlight the real dangers linked to the pills.
