Coloplast Reported to Offer $16 Million to Settle Transvaginal Mesh Lawsuits

Prolene Mesh

March 4, 2014 ~ Coloplast is one of the smaller manufacturers of transvaginal meshes and is one of six of the 53,000 cases consolidated in federal court in West Virginia. Now Coloplast A/S is said to be willing to settle its outstanding lawsuits for $16 million.

The Danish company will offer about $40,000 for each claimant, reports Bloomberg, to settle about 400 product liability lawsuits. Women who have had their life damaged by migrating and infected polypropylene mesh, that amount is hardly enough to regain their lives much less cover the future surgeries they will need for removal and treatments.

Coloplast was entered into multidistrict litigation in August 2012. Mesh News Desk did a story on the products it made at that time here.

There are currently 1,356 Coloplast lawsuits filed in the So. District of W.V. here.

Other manufacturers include Ethicon, a division of Johnson & Johnson, American Medical Systems (a unit of Endo health), Boston Scientific, C.R. Bard and Cook.

J&J has refused to discuss settlements vowing to try each case on its own merits. That is what it said about the DePuy metal–on-metal defective hips that left so many in need of a revision while causing pain and toxic metal poisoning, before it made a settlement offer of $2.7 billion that is expected to grow as more cases come forward.

These are product liability lawsuits that claim the defective transvaginal mesh products should never had been made and certainly should never have been released on an unsuspecting public without clinical trials.

The meshes used to treat incontinence and to hold up sagging pelvic organs, are approved under a safety loophole of the Food and Drug Administration known as the 510(k) approval process. There are at least 60,000 lawsuits filed around the country in state courts with the majority filed in federal court in Charleston, West Virgina.

Business Week story is here.