Legal Questions Still Dogging Wyeth (at TheStreet.com)

From Wyeth WYE and diet drugs, to Merck MRK and Vioxx to Eli Lilly LLY and Zyprexa, companies are forced to make careful calculations about mass product-liability lawsuits. No easy answers exist. Wyeth, or example, has set aside some $21.1 billion reserves, and paid nearly $19 billion, in diet-drug litigation and settlements. But the company continues to wrestle with another legal dilemma with the drugs Premarin, Prempro and Premphase. Plaintiffs' lawyers have filed approximately 5,400 lawsuits alleging that these hormone therapy drugs have caused breast cancer, strokes, ovarian cancer and heart disease. The lawsuits started after a large federal study warned in mid-2002 about the risks of invasive breast cancer in women taking the hormones estrogen and progestin. Prempro and Premphase contain both, while Premarin contains... [read full story]