Lawyer Grills Merck Researcher at Trial
Posted on: Wednesday, 12 October 2005, 15:00 CDT
By BONNIE PFISTER
ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. - A lawyer for the Idaho postal worker who blames Vioxx for his September 2001 heart attack grilled a Merck & Co. researcher Wednesday about why the company did not raise alerts over deaths among certain Vioxx users five months earlier.
In Vioxx's second product liability trial, attorney David Buchanan questioned researcher Dr. Alise Reicin about mortality rates of people in clinical trials meant to see if Vioxx could also be used to treat Alzheimer's disease.
While three times as many Vioxx users died compared with those taking placebos, or inactive pills, Reicin said it wasn't clear that those deaths were due to Vioxx. Rather, those people died of other causes, such as car crashes and other accidents.
Additionally, Reicin said, rates of cardiovascular trouble among those on Vioxx were the same as those taking a placebo.
"We didn't view it as a safety signal, because the deaths were so different," Reicin testified.
Buchanan represents Frederick "Mike" Humeston, 60, who suffered a heart attack in his Boise home four years ago after taking Vioxx intermittently for two months to ease lingering knee pain.
Merck says Humeston's job stress and health risks, not Vioxx, caused his heart attack.
Studies by the Whitehouse Station-based company beginning in 1995 showed Vioxx was safe, Reicin testified. That was until a Merck study concluded that heart attacks and strokes doubled among patients taking the drug for more than 18 months - prompting the company in September 2004 to withdraw the popular arthritis pill from the market.
Earlier Wednesday, Merck attorney Stephen Raber elicited responses from Reicin to suggest that through 2001 Merck undertook multiple reviews - both on its own and by independent experts - to determine Vioxx's safety, and those results were submitted to federal regulators, published in medical journals and made available to prescribing doctors.
In August, Merck lost a multimillion dollar Vioxx trial in Texas, and about 5,000 similar lawsuits are pending.
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On the Net: http://www.merck.com
Source: Associated Press/AP Online
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