Oniam experts responsible for evaluating the compensation files of Mediaor victims have a favorable opinion in 12% of cases against 7.6% three months ago.
The trial of Servier laboratories for “aggravated deception” in the Mediator case resumes this Tuesday, May 21 before the criminal court of Nanterre. The boss of the second French pharmaceutical laboratory as well as four former executives of the company, and of its subsidiary Biopharma, will face more than 700 civil parties who are awaiting redress in this lawsuit.
Regarding the compensation of its victims, the burden falls on the National Office for Compensation for Medical Accidents. Oniam has commissioned a college of independent experts to deal with the numerous cases. Often criticized for its slowness, and its intransigence in examining cases, the college now seems to have partly rectified the situation.
In fact, at the beginning of February 2013, the ONIAM experts acknowledged having delivered 836 opinions in 1 year on the 7,500 files submitted by the victims. In addition, the compensation rate remained very low with only 64 favorable opinions (7.6%). The equation had jumped the associations of victims of the Mediator.
As of May 21, the college had processed 1,279 files out of the 7935 received, ie 400 more in three months. “The rate of processing of cases has significantly accelerated” recognizes Erik Rance, director of Oniam. In addition, among these cases already processed, 152 favorable compensation opinions were issued, ie a compensation rate of nearly 12% for the victims.
Almost 90% of the cases examined are still rejected. Of these 992 files, 30% related to a pathology, neither cardiac nor pulmonary, and 45% of them presented valvulopathies which were considered by the experts as not attributable to the Mediator. These cases were “aortic stenosis”, in other words a narrowing of the aorta, the cause of which was not the drug from Servier laboratories. Finally, 600 cases were rejected, due to their ineligibility for the compensation criteria of Oniam and 90 are still awaiting additional documents.
At the end of March, the Brest pulmonologist Irène Frachon, at the origin of the revelation of the Mediator affair, estimated that the experts did not take into account existing studies for admissible cases. “PFor Oniam, in the files that we were able to study (82), the link between taking Mediator and the disorders observed is recognized in less than half of the cases, when the studies highlight a probability of causality greater than 90% ”, affirmed the pulmonologist. And she added, “this is particularly true for the less serious attacks, those for which flagrant physical evidence is lacking.”
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