More than one thousand Australian women are commencing a class action in the Victorian Supreme Court today against the manufacturer of a contraceptive device they say left them in extreme pain.
The class action is seeing the women taking on the multinational pharmaceutical giant Bayer, regarding their contraceptive device Essure, which the women say left them in extreme pain, with some needing to go on to have hysterectomies.
Slater and Gordon senior associate Kylie Trounson took on the class action three years ago. The law firm claims the devices damaged their clients’ health, and they allege Bayer failed to warn women of the risks associated with the device. The trial is expected to last 12 weeks and involve Bayer and other entities that distributed and manufactured Essure between 1997 and 2017 in Australia.
Bayer says it continues to stand behind the safety and efficacy of Essure, which it stopped selling in 2017. It has already settled a case with 39,000 women in the United States for US$1.6 billion, with some of the Australian women involved in the Australian case questioning why the pharmaceutical giant hasn’t done more for Australian women who also received the device.
“We are confident that the evidence, in this case, will demonstrate the company is not responsible for the alleged injuries,” Bayer said in a statement regarding the class action.
Kylie Trounson told AAP that the women are frustrated at the fact there has been no settlement locally here, despite the large sums of money paid in the US.
“A large multinational entity like Bayer is of course entitled at law to defend litigation in Australia and elsewhere as it sees fit, however it is not just our clients who are impacted by the need to go to trial,” she said. “There is also enormous costs to the taxpayer in respect of course resources being expended on this trial, which is expected to run for three months.”
Slater and Gordon claims the device has been linked with a range of serious conditions and complications including choric pelvic and abdominal pain, irregular menstrual bleeding and cramping, the device migrating through the fallopian tubes, corrosion of the device, perforation of the fallopian tubes and other organs.
Some of the women involved in the class action talk about the pain feeling like a “knife in the stomach”. Others say they missed significant periods of world due to what they experienced. Some discuss the trauma of going on to have hysterectomies, including one woman who says she had a hysterectomy at the age of just 35 to have the device removed. Others say the only way they were able to find answers regarding the pain they were experiencing was through turning to social media and finding a Facebook support group of women who had experienced similar symptoms, and others again only linked the pain they had been experiencing to potentially involving the device, after reading about legal action taken against the manufacturer internationally.
The device, a metal spring-like coil, works to prevent pregnancy by being inserted in each fallopian tube, and creating scar tissue around the device to anchor it in place and block the passage of sperm,.
The Australian class action comes as Bayer recently announced its traditional drug research focus would shift away from women’s health, to instead move to neurology, rare diseases and immunology.
“When it comes to research and the subsequent clinical phases, we will no longer have an explicit focus on women’s health,” the head of Bayer’s pharmaceuticals unit, Stefan Oelrich, told Reuters in March.
Bayer makes the Yasmin brand of birth control pills, as well as the Mirena intrauterine device.
Bayer is believed to have sold 750,000 Essure devices internationally before the product was taken off the market in 2017 for commercial reasons.
In July last year, Australian women won a $105 million settlement from the multinational manufacturer of medical devices Boston Scientific, for the severe pain they experienced after receiving pelvic mesh and sling implants, once the most commonly used treatment for pelvic prolapse or stress urinary incontinence.