Kristina Bishop filed another Yaz lawsuit in the Superior Court of the state of California, Los Angeles on February 3. She is accusing the defendant, Bayer, of failing to properly warn her of the dangers linked to the controversial birth control pills.
Bishop was diagnosed with gallbladder disease after taking the pills; in fact, her case was severe enough that she had to have her gallbladder removed on April 27, 2010. Her condition has long been linked to Yaz and Yasmin, as well as other generic versions of the pills that contain drospirenone. Bayer continues to maintain that the pills are no more dangerous than other birth control pills that don’t contain drospirenone.
Patients like Bishop have been developing various debilitating and life-threatening conditions after taking Yaz for years now. Some of those conditions include heart attacks, strokes, gallbladder disease, blood clots that can lead to pulmonary embolisms and deep vein thrombosis. Many studies have been conducted that show Yaz and Yasmin’s links to these serious conditions and numerous patients have filed lawsuits against Bayer because of it. The patients have claimed that the drug giant knowingly hid the dangerous side effects of Yaz from both consumers and healthcare professionals.
Bayer even got itself in hot water for launching a marketing campaign that seemed to promote Yaz as a cure-all pill that could fix everything from acne to PMS. Both those claims are considered off-label uses of the pills, which caused the FDA to force Bayer to change the ad to include the dangers in the advertisement. That effort by the FDA was too little, too late for the patients who based their decision to take Yaz on those commercials. Recently, the FDA even went so far as to conduct a panel advisory meeting to discuss the real links between Yaz and blood clots; however, the panel voted that the benefits outweighed the risks in taking Yaz. This decision by the panel caused a controversy when it was discovered that some of the panelists had financial ties to Bayer. This caused many to call for a new advisory panel meeting that couldn’t be tainted with “bias.”
