Fen-Phen Maker to Pay Billions In Settlement of Diet-Injury Cases
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The American Home Products Corporation agreed yesterday to pay $3.75 billion in total to thousands of people who contend they were injured by taking the popular diet pill combination fen-phen. Under the settlement — one of the largest ever in a product liability case — people who used one of the diet drugs for 60 days or less would be eligible for $30 to $60 prescription refunds, while those who have a heart valve injury could receive as much as $1.5 million. While executives and industry analysts hailed the agreement — which came after months of negotiations and whose terms were widely expected — as a way for the company to put an embarrassing problem behind it, yesterday’s agreement does not shield American Home Products from all fen-phen liabilities. Some six million people took the diet drugs Pondimin, American Home Products’ brand name for fenfluramine, the ”fen” in fen-phen, and Redux, a similar drug. The drugs were hailed earlier in the decade as miracle pills for obesity, as an alternative to pure diet and exercise. Diet centers actively promoted the pills to the obese and even to people who wanted to lose a few pounds. In 1996, doctors wrote 18 million prescriptions for the two drugs. More : query.nytimes.com |