The number of victims of the Mediator has been revised upwards by the legal experts in the case. According to the expert’s report, between 1,300 and 1,800 long-term deaths are attributable to a valve disease.
From 1,300 to 1,800, this is the number of long-term deaths that would be attributable to a valve disease, according to the conclusions of the expert report on the Mediator presented on April 12 to the Paris prosecutor’s office.
The legal experts in the case have also estimated between 220 and 300 deaths from short-term valve disease, that is to say deaths occurring within two and a half years after starting to take the drug. They also evaluated the number of hospitalizations for valve insufficiency between 3100 and 4200. A report, however incomplete and certainly far removed from the real figures of the victims of the Mediator because “there is no evaluation of the number of deaths due to Pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH), another serious possible harm due to the Mediator, ”add the experts.
Furthermore, the marketing of the drug, whose “powerful anorectic properties” are confirmed, should have been suspended between 1998 and 2003 by Servier or by the authorities in view of the first reports, specifies the report. But in fact, the Mediator was suspended in November 2009 and withdrawn definitively in July 2010. A conclusion that goes in the direction of the indictment, pronounced last March, against the Medicines Agency for ” homicides and unintentional injuries ”.
Finally, the experts estimate at the same time that “the absence of readable information concerning the metabolism of benfluorex and its relationship with anorectics did not allow the practitioners to exercise an adequate monitoring of the patients on the cardiovascular and pulmonary plan”. In other words, doctors were unaware of the fate of the drug in the body and the fact that its molecule was very close to appetite suppressants, the toxicity of which was already known.
As a reminder, a study was published in February 2012 by the specialized journal Pharmacoepidemiology & Drug Safety, it estimated that the Mediator had “probably” caused 3,100 hospitalizations and at least 1,300 deaths from valve disease between 1976 and 2009 in France.
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