Tens of thousands of lawsuits have been filed since the drug was withdrawn in 2020
Zantac -- also known as ranitidine --was a popular heartburn drug until 2020, when the Food and Drug Administration ordered it removed from pharmacy shelves because of a potential cancer risk.
While this presumably protects people who might have taken the drug after 2020, it doesn't do much for those who took it before then, like Ronald Kimbrow, a Chicago-area man who blames his prostate cancer on Zantac.
Kimbrow, 73, said he took Zantac from 1995 to 2019.
There have been tens of thousands of lawsuits since 2020 and there are no doubt many more in the pipeline but few have gone to trial. Kimbrow's case, unlike most of the others, has gone before a jury not once but twice.
But both cases have ended with a hung jury, the most recent oneyesterday. The jurors were unable to decide whether German pharmaceuticalBoehringer Ingelheim should be on the hook for damages in Kimbrow's case.
Kimbrow's lawyer says he will refile the case and expects to win eventually.Boehringer Ingelheim has now twice failed to convince a jury that Zantac was safe, attorney Eric Olson said in an email, according to a Reuters report.
Kimbrow has already settled with other companies that made the drug, including GSK and Pfizer. Those companies have reportedly settled with thousands of other plaintiffs. Such settlements are often private and not available to the public.
The FDA in 2020 asked manufacturers to pull the drug off the market over concerns that its active ingredient, ranitidine, could degrade into NDMA, a carcinogen, over time or when exposed to heat.
On the market for decades
Zantact and its many generic copies were on the market for nearly four decades when the FDA ordered it removed.
The FDA acted six months after an independent lab warned the FDA of a potential carcinogen in ranitidine drugs and nearly three months after another lab told the FDA its testsdetermined levels of NDMA could increase if the drug is stored above room temperature.
We didn't observe unacceptable levels of NDMA in many of the samples that we tested. However, since we don't know how or for how long the product might have been stored, we decided that it should not be available to consumers and patients unless its quality can be assured," Janet Woodcock, FDA director of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said in a statement at the time.
Photo Credit: Consumer Affairs News Department Images
Posted: 2024-09-19 16:32:49
