The number of Xarelto lawsuits filed in 2016 kept rising steadily in the United States. Now a substantial number of plaintiffs started seeking for compensatory damage even in Canada. Rivaroxaban is a blood thinner drug marketed by Bayer AG and Janssen Pharmaceutical. It was approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to replace Warfarin, an older anticoagulant drug that required constant monitoring and forced patients who took it to observe several dietary restrictions. The newer medication, on the other hand, was devoid of such limitations, and it was widely advertised as a safer and more effective drug than its older counterpart. However, due to the absence of a proper antidote to reverse its effects, Xarelto was linked with many uncontrolled bleeding accidents that, in some instances, even led to patients’ deaths.
Many American patients filed a litigation to force the pharmaceutical companies into paying a huge settlement to compensate the damage and injuries they suffered. However, even Canadian citizens have now started to add up their own litigations to the already high pile of lawsuits pending against Bayer and Janssen. The first Canadian Xarelto lawsuit has been filed on February 2016 in Calgary, and another one is going to be filed soon in Ontario. The Canadian plaintiff was a woman who took the drug to treat her atrial fibrillation but suffered from an internal bleeding accident that subsequently caused her a heart attack. Physicians struggled a lot to stop her hemorrhaging as they had no antidote available, and her bleeding had dire consequences on her cardiovascular health.
The Canadian regulatory agency equivalent of FDA, Health Canada, received about 1,110 adverse event reports from patients who used the drug. At least a dozen of these reports even included deaths. The new Ontario lawsuit is expected to be filed by an 83-year-old woman who died of internal bleeding in November 2013 while she was showering. Her family is seeking for compensation as her death resulted from using this blood thinner that they allege it was misleadingly and fraudulently advertised as safe and effective.
Article written by: Dr. Claudio Butticè, Pharm.D.
Published: 2016/04/26
