The lawsuit was filed by Mary Lou M., a woman who was implanted with the C.R. Bard Eclipse® Vena Cava Filter on August 8, 2010 at a hospital in Michigan.
Eclipse is designed to prevent pulmonary embolisms, in which blood clots break off in a vein, travel in the bloodstream, and clog the lungs.
It was approved by the FDA in January 2010, but the agency did not require clinical trials because Eclipse was so similar to the Bard G2 Express IVC Filter, but with a more highly-polished surface.
The problem is that the Bard G2 and other filters have been linked to serious safety hazards. The company has repeatedly sold and withdrawn these filters without recalls.
In fact, the only blood clot filter that C.R. Bard currently sells is the Denali, which the company introduced in 2013 after withdrawing Eclipse and Meridian filters.
Some studies of these older models of Bard IVC filters have concluded with dire warnings about “high prevalences of fracture and embolization, with potentially life-threatening [consequences].”
For example, the Bard Recovery (withdrawn in 2005) and G2 (withdrawn in 2010) have been estimated to fracture in around 40% of patients within 5.5 years, according to recent studies.
Lawyers accuse C.R. Bard of negligence for selling defective medical devices with unreasonably dangerous risks, failing to warn about side effects, and inadequately testing devices for safety.
The lawsuit was filed on December 28, 2016 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona — Case No. 2:16-cv-04561.
It will be centralized with at least 1,283 other IVC filter lawsuits now pending against C.R. Bard in Multi-District Litigation (MDL No. 2641) — In Re: Bard IVC Filters Products Liability Litigation.
The plaintiff is represented by Ben C. Martin of The Law Offices of Ben C. Martin in Dallas, Texas. He serves on the plaintiffs’ steering committee of the Bard IVC Filter MDL.