A $3.75 billion settlement fund created to compensate people who took the diet drug fen-phen has been flooded with thousands of bogus heart-damage claims, according to its lawyers.
When the Philadelphia-based AHP Settlement Trust was created, only about 8,300 claims were expected from dieters who used fen-phen and Redux in the 1990s. Today 71,000 claims have been filed. The trust was created after American Home Products, now Wyeth, agreed to a nationwide class-action settlement in 1999.
To date the trust has paid about 2,700 claims at an average of $400,000.
Peter L. Zimroth, an attorney for Wyeth, declared in a court filing late last year that the “claims process had been hijacked by lawyers stamping out tens of thousands of baseless claims.”
Plaintiffs’ lawyers argue that Wyeth “vastly underestimated the extent of heart damage caused by its drugs and that scientific data projecting only 8,300 serious injuries was wrong,” reported the Kansas City Star.
(via Knight Ridder Newspapers)
3 responses so far ↓
gardner // May 3, 2004 at 4:09 pm
how would you find out if you were paid for a fen-phen case. I have my #
Cathy W // Jan 25, 2005 at 8:55 am
Can anything be done if you case was tossed out. I since have be told that I have secondary pulmonary hypertension. My doctor said it is cause from the diet pills and sleep apnia.
Steve // Jul 12, 2005 at 9:24 am
PPH has nothing to do with the settlement, but youmay have some Statute of Limitations issues
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