DePuy parent company Johnson & Johnson has offered to resolve as many as 1,400 additional claims from patients who were excluded from a $2.5 billion settlement in 2013.
The settlement deadline extension filed in federal court in Toledo, Ohio, would cover claims from patients who had articular surface replacement hip implants removed between the original August 2013 cutoff date and January 2015. J&J could pay as much as $420 million to resolve the additional lawsuits, Bloomberg reports.
The extension allows the additional patients to each seek $250,000 to $300,000 in compensation under the 2013 agreement. Both settlements are estimated to resolve more than 90 percent of current hip-removal suits.
The company recalled in 2010 about 93,000 ASR hips implanted in patients worldwide, and soon faced more than 12,000 lawsuits in the U.S. alone, Blomberg says, citing a 2014 U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing. J&J and DePuy said 12 percent of the hips failed within five years, though internal documents showed a 37 percent failure rate after 4.6 years, according to the publication.
The device was first sold in the U.S. in 2005 but was available earlier in other countries. Nearly 2,000 patients in Australia have joined a class-action lawsuit, among the more than 5,000 who received the implant between 2003 and the 2010 recall, the Sydney Morning Herald reports, citing figures from the Australian Orthopaedic Association's National Joint Replacement Registry.
In India, where around 4,600 patients received the hip, health authorities filed a criminal case against J&J in 2011 and asked federal police to step in. The company approached the High Court in Mumbai in 2013 attempting to prevent the handing over to police of names and address details of J&J corporate directors and officers in India, but the court dismissed the attempt.
J&J’s settlement in the U.S. followed a California jury’s conclusion in March 2013 – in the first lawsuit to go to trial in the U.S. – that one patient deserved $8.3 million in damages over his failed hip implant, citing flawed design and negligence in warning patients of the risks.
(Story By The Times Union)
