A Washington state hospital will have to pay the family of a disabled Seattle-area girl with cerebral palsy nearly $4.25 million after a jury determined the hospital’s negligence led to the child’s condition.
In a statement, attorneys representing the family say the hospital "ignored signs of severe fetal distress and failed to timely notify a doctor." The attorneys say that resulted in the child suffering from asphyxiation for over 20 minutes before an emergency C-section was performed.
The girl, who is now five-years-old, has cerebral palsy, is brain damaged and severely disabled.
the cerebral palsy attorney for the family suggests in the statement that the child’s condition could have been prevented if nurses had notified a doctor in time to do a crash C-section.
The hospital claims that the child’s injuries had already occurred before her mother arrived at the hospital.
Doctors have been able to test unborn babies for Down syndrome and other birth defects for a while now, but these invasive procedures (such as amniocentesis and chorionic villus sampling, or CVS) posed a risk to the unborn baby. However, a newly developed blood DNA test has been developed that poses no risk to the fetus.
The test requires only a small blood sample from the mother, whereas the old tests require sticking a needle in the uterus or snipping off a small piece of the placenta for analysis. The old tests are done after the 15th week of pregnancy (with results in two to three weeks). The new blood test can be done very early in a pregnancy at five weeks after conception (with results in a few days).
While all of the tests look for Down syndrome, other serious chromosomal conditions can be detected by the new test. It can detect the presence of Edward syndrome, a syndrome that occurs in approximately one in 6,000 live births and has a very low rate of survival. Patau syndrome can also be detected with the new test. The condition causes physical and mental abnormalties, especially around the heart. It affects about 1 in 12,000 live births.
While there are other noninvasive prenatal tests available, such as the ultrasound, they cannot diagnose with certainty. A much larger study of the new test is needed to confirm results, and the test could become widely available in the next two to three years. The current cost is around $700, but that cost will drop considerably if the test becomes widely used.
Two lawsuits filed by West Virginia families claim the antidepressant Paxil was responsible for their children’s birth defects.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced in December 2005 that it was requiring Glaxo to add warnings of birth defects to the drug’s prescribing information. This decision was fueled by two studies that showed that women who took Paxil during the first three months of pregnancy were about one and a half to two times as likely to have a baby with a heart defect than women who took other antidepressants or women in the general population.
The lawsuits claim that Glaxo knew that Paxil was associated with birth defects prior to the 2005 label change and that the heart birth defects that are present in their children wre the result of their mother’s Paxil use during pregnancy.
The women involved in the lawsuits claim that they took Paxil because Glaxo promoted the drug as a safe alternative to pregnant women. However, when their children were born, they suffered from congenital injuries and disorders and birth defects, as well as heart defects and developmental delays.
Also, a class action lawsuit has been settled that will reimburse health plans that paid for children and young adults who receive Paxil. While the drug is not approved for use in children, doctors often prescribe the drug when they see fit. While Paxil isn’t necessarily a defective drug, several studies have shown that Paxil and similar antidepressants cause suicides in teenagers.
If you or a member of your family were prescribed Paxil and suffered adverse side effects, you should contact an experienced defective drug attorney for professional insight.