Senator Calls for DOJ Action Against Philips for Keeping CPAP Machine Complaints Secret
Senator Calls for DOJ Action Against Philips for Keeping CPAP Machine Complaints Secret
Sen. Richard Blumenthal is seeking federal enforcement days after a ProPublica and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette investigation revealed the company kept secret more than 3,700 complaints about its breathing machines over 11 years.
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I have a close relative that was killed by the Philips CPAP Machine. The lawyers for the class action recently told us that almost a billion dollars were set aside by Philips to pay out claims. It's not enough. The people at the top need be put in prison for this. Fines and monetary compensation for the families is not enough. If they do end up in prison it would be some of the most wonderful schadenfreude if someone used the money they get from the lawsuit to hire other prisoners to torture the Philips CEO's every day they are in until they can take it no more and kill themselves.
I don't mean to seem disrespectful of the loss of your relative in any way, but how were you able to establish a causal relationship between the CPAP machine and a particular illness or death?
It's not a question based in some sort of absolvence-by-legal-technicality, but I often read accounts of grieving family members who "just know" that that MMR vaccine caused their son's autism, or that dad using a chemical occasionally in the garage "must have" caused his cancer - because it's less scary than the idea that bad health problems happen at random to people who didn't do anything to cause it.
Edit: rarely, some health condition leads to a smoking gun, but most do not. Mesothelioma is only caused by exposure to asbestos, which is why you see commercials for lawyers seeking plaintiffs for injury cases. The causal relationship is established.
He used the Philips CPAP machines, developed lung cancer, and passed. He was otherwise healthy. He was never a smoker and worked in a grocery store. There were no other factors causing the cancer.
The doctor that diagnosed the cancer said it was most probably due to the Philips CPAP machine and recommended that we contact the attorneys handling the case. We contacted the attorneys for the class action and answered a few of their questions and provided documentation. We are now part of the class action.
It has been proven that the machines caused harm. The only thing in question is how long they knew and how much they will pay.
That's interesting, thanks.
To be fair, there was no definite link for babies born with birth defects to parents who worked at Teflon and PFOA plants. Despite having a rare birth defect...
It was hard enough for the "radium girls" to prove a link between their occupation and resulting ailments. Many of them were dead by time the suit was settled.
Like you said, that causal link is going to be near impossible to prove. But we shouldn't let companies off the hook because there's a 1% chance that they could have gotten cancer without the exposure.
The problem lies in how we determine legal liability.
Believe me when I say I'm not on corporations' side and I think they get away with all kinds of immoral shit through craftiness in the legal system, but I think that the only intellectually honest answer is that suspicious linkages are not causality, and that it should be evaluated by someone wielding scientific impartiality and robust statistical and epidemiological methods, rather than a legal process. Unfortunately courts are a shit place to evaluate science or broadly reality.
PFOA and similar precursor chemicals are one of those areas where I think it should be easy to establish elevated risk of disease with epidemiology (they probably have, but it's not my field and I haven't looked), but there are a lot of other areas that are much less clear cut. I've seen firsthand the family's emotional response to cancer being to find a villain somewhere, and it was in a case where I think no villain ever existed. People behave irrationally with mortal disease, and unfortunately some of it is just bad luck.
So I did not know all the details and your comments had me curious so I asked my relative's widow. They found the same foam from the machine in the biopsy when he was diagnosed. There was an autopsy after death and a lot of it was found in his lungs.
There is absolutely a causal relationship in this case.
I would appreciate you not downplaying the company's responsibility.