Marielle Klein will remember this October 10, 2011 for a long time. She was then 34 years old and had just had her fifth child. “I was planning to stop there,” she says in The Parisian. Without taking the pill or using an IUD.
His gynecologist then advised him to use Essure, a permanent contraceptive method, supported by health insurance. 120,000 women in France have chosen this device.
These “are small springs, explains the daily, implanted without general anesthesia in the tubes, causing an obstruction making fertilization impossible”.
Two years later, young Lorraine was plagued by very strong stomach aches, heart palpitations and then unbearable pain. After several investigations, the specialists discover that she is allergic to nickel. The implants have them. Marielle has them removed and most of the pain disappears.
This mother is now the “spearhead” of a fight. Because behind his story, “a new health crisis is emerging”, the daily believes. Marielle’s case is not isolated. For some patients who have used this contraceptive method, “the side effects are dramatic”. “Weight loss, fatigue that can go as far as nervous breakdown, headaches, muscle and/or joint pain”, confirms Dr. Bernard Hédon, president of the National College of French Gynecologists and Obstetricians (CNGOF).
If the Bayer laboratory, manufacturer of this device, does not deny the existence of possible side effects, “as for any medical procedure”, it recalls in the columns of the newspaper that the information documents are “developed in close collaboration with the health authorities” and that the benefit/risk ratio remains positive.
Same tone on the side of the National Agency for the Safety of Medicines, which specifies that the device has been the subject of “reinforced surveillance” for two years, whereas, specifies the General Directorate of Health (DGS), no element , at this stage, does not make it possible to “question the benefit/risk ratio”.
But according to information revealed by The Parisian, the number of reports of side effects increased from 40 in 2012 to 162 between January and October 2016. not of the Essure device itself. »
“We are only at the beginning of a very large public health file”, warns Me Charles Joseph-Oudin. The lawyer for the victims of the Mediator launches this Friday his first legal action against the Bayer laboratory and requests that experts be appointed to quantify “the damage of the victims”. 28 files would be examined by the lawyer.
Marielle Klein, one of the complainants, has launched a petition to ask the Ministry of Health to act. It would have collected 45,000 signatures.
