CALGARY, AB, December 18, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A father in Calgary is suing the pharmacy chain that sold his 18-year-old daughter a drug that he believes is responsible for her catastrophic death last January. He says that Shoppers Drug Mart did not provide sufficient warning about the risks associated with taking the drug.
“Shoppers Drug Mart said that this medication might cause dizziness or headaches or nausea. But they failed to say that this drug might kill somebody from a blood clot, which all the other pharmacies that we pulled information from, that was the No. 1 thing they said,” Bruce McKenzie, told CBC News.
McKenzie’s daughter Marit, a freshman at the University of Calgary, died after suffering four heart attacks, a pulmonary embolism, and bleeding in the brain in late January after less than a year of taking Diane-35, manufactured by Bayer.
Diane-35 is a controversial hormone pill intended to treat acne and excessive hairiness in women but is often prescribed by doctors as an off-label contraceptive.
Shoppers lists “hormone-based contraceptive” at the top of the list of the drug’s common usage.
Marit, who had a fair complexion, allegedly was in a relationship at the time her doctor prescribed the pills. It is unclear if she was on the pill for acne.
The family is seeking $85,000 in damages, the most permitted in Alberta for such a claim, and legal costs.
“Shoppers was negligent in providing sufficient information to Marit regarding the warnings and risks associated with taking Diane-35,” the family states in its claim filed in a Calgary court last week.
The family stated in the claim its belief that Shoppers did not fulfill its duty to “provide accurate, current and pertinent information” about the risks of Diane-35 to their daughter.
Health Canada’s database of adverse drug reactions unofficially links Diane-35 to the deaths of 18 women since 2000, 12 of them under the age of 25. Also reported in the database are 186 “serious” reactions to the drug, including unintended abortion, blindness, convulsions, hemorrhaging, depression, and blood clots.
Tens of thousands of prescriptions for Diane-35 were written in Canada last year according to data from IMS Brogan, a firm that collects and analyses health care information, reported Toronto Star.
The Netherlands Pharmacovigilance Center recently implicated Diane-35 in the deaths of 27 women, the majority younger than 30. Most died from blood clots becoming lodged in their brains, lungs or hearts.
France banned the sale of the drug in January after the country’s drug and safety administration linked it directly to the deaths of four women. But European Union health officials overturned the country’s ban six months later, ruling that the benefits of the drug outweigh its risks when taken as directed.
Health Canada has issued several warnings about the drug over the years, but doctors and pharmacist appear not to be listening.
Minister of Health Rona Ambrose said in November that she had personally asked the drug’s manufacture Bayer to “fund a physician's education initiative to provide further guidance to healthcare professionals” since “many prescriptions for Diane-35 are off-label and prescribed as birth control, a use the manufacturer has not been granted approval for by Health Canada.”