Written by
Walter F. Roche Jr.
The Tennessean
A $15 million lawsuit has been filed in U.S. District Court by the widow of Kentucky Circuit Judge Eddie C. Lovelace, the first known local victim of a fungal meningitis outbreak blamed on a defunct Massachusetts drug compounder.
The 54-page complaint filed late Thursday charges negligence, violations of the state product and health liability laws and civil conspiracy. Defendants include the owners of the defunct compounding firm and the Saint Thomas Outpatient Neurosurgical Center, where Lovelace was injected with a spinal steroid three times.
The filing, just days before the one-year anniversary of the 78-year-old Kentucky judge’s death, comes as state and federal officials raised by one the official death toll from the outbreak among Tennessee patients from 15 to 16.
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1 comment:
The "deep pocket" in this lawsuit will be the physician office who injected these compounded drugs. They will settle out of court (or LOSE IN COURT) because:
- the physicians bought drugs wholesale (no patient-specific prescriptions) from a compounding pharmacy that was not licensed as a manufacturer or a wholesale drug distributor;
- the drugs they bought did not have a "Pedigree" that proves that they were not contraband drugs;
- the physicians did not exercise due diligence to ensure the medications they were injecting were quality (tested for potency and sterility);
and
- "FDA-approved" versions of these drugs were available, but the doctors and clinics wanted to increase their profit margin by buying unapproved (and lesser quality) drugs from an unlicensed manufacturer/wholesale distributor at a lower price than the safer FDA-approved drug.
As a physician who prescribes and administers cimpounded medications, I am more fearful of my patients' safety and my own liability whenever doing so.
Kenneth Woliner, MD
www.holisticfamilymed.com
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