By Amy Silverstein
Published Fri., Jul. 11 2014 at 7:08 AM
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Future Texas Governor Greg Abbott hates nothing
more than he hates abortions, Planned Parenthood and other
women's-health-related things, leading the Texas Democratic Party to describe
him as "public enemy number one for women in Texas." But now, in a
major national fight pitting women's health advocates against a corporate
giant, Abbott appears to have jumped in bed with women and their bodies.
For the past two years, the Texas Attorney
General's office has been quietly leading an investigation into Johnson & Johnson's Ethicon
subsidiary, after thousands of women nationwide alleged in lawsuits and
complaints to the FDA that the company's pelvic mesh products are defective.
As I reported in a recent feature story on mesh, Ethicon and
other companies thought they'd discovered a new, easy way to cure poor bladder
control and similar health ills common in aging women and women who have had
babies. The fix, rushed to
the market in the late 90s, is a surgical device made out of plastic surgical mesh,
inserted through the vagina. Patients
have complained en masse that the "fix" destroyed their sex lives,
worsened their incontinence and caused horrendous pain. More than 17,000
lawsuits have been filed against Ethicon alone.
The FDA
was slow to respond, but in 2011 regulators finally issued a warning that complications from some
of the mesh surgeries are "not rare." The FDA has yet to issue a
formal recall.
Abbott, meanwhile, is investigating Johnson &
Johnson under the Texas
Deceptive Trade Practices-Consumer Protection Act. In a demand letter
sent in April, the Attorney General asked Johnson & Johnson for physical
samples of the mesh, detailed data on the material it's composed of, a list of
all websites sponsored by Johnson & Johnson discussing the mesh and other
data. That's only the latest request for information, following up on a
separate demand the Attorney General sent in March 2013. The whole investigation began two
years ago, the AG's office tells Unfair Park.
The
investigation became public after a group of Texas women wrote a letter to
Abbott asking him to crack down on the company, only to find out that he's
already looking into it, as WFAA reported.
Women's health aside, Texas and other states have
its own reasons to investigate this. "You, as a tax-payer, you're paying
for the Medicare patients who have had this thing in," Dr. Daniel Elliott,
a surgeon at the Mayo Clinic who treats women suffering mesh complications,
told us a few months ago. "Then the patient has all these complications,
and you as the taxpayer
are paying for their original surgery and you're paying for all these
treatments afterwards. It's
a huge financial burden on the system."
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