September 25, 2017.
The Servier laboratory has just been condemned by the Court of Cassation to compensate a victim of the Mediator. It is the end of a long legal saga that could continue on the criminal level.
Thousands of French victims of the Mediator for 30 years
The Court of Cassation has just opened a new chapter in the Mediator case. By a judgment delivered on Friday 23 September, the Servier laboratory, manufacturer of the Mediator, was found responsible for the state of health of a complainant who had been prescribed this antidiabetic for three years.
Justice thus formally recognizes that the Servier laboratory was aware of the side effects – pulmonary arterial hypertension and valve disease – caused by this substance widely distributed in France by doctors who prescribed it for its appetite suppressant effect. The complainant, who claimed more than € 40,000, was compensated in the amount of € 7,650.
The Servier laboratory will have to explain itself to the criminal court
” Servier laboratories can no longer […] claim that they were unaware of the harmfulness of their medicine. The Court validated international studies which pointed out in 1998 the dangers of the Mediator, and which led to its withdrawal from the market in other European countries », Commented Maître Martine Verdier, lawyer of the plaintiff, in remarks taken up by the association UFC-Que Choisir which brought civil action in this file.
The Mediator has been marketed for more than 30 years in France and around five million people have consumed it.. It is estimated that between 1,520 and 2,100 deaths could be caused by this drug. Another aspect of this case also opened in parallel with this judgment since the investigating judges of the Paris public health center issued, at the end of August, an order of referral to the criminal court, opening the right to victims of to come together in a big lawsuit against the laboratory.
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