A Georgia couple has filed a C. R. Bard inferior vena cava (IVC) filter lawsuit alleging the company’s G2 Filter System forced the wife to undergo emergency surgery when a piece of the device broke away and perforated a muscle in her heart.
Bard IVC filters—small, spider-shaped devices intended to capture blood clots before they reach vital organs and cause embolic events—gained national attention recently when an NBC Nightly News report investigated a possible life-threating flaw in their design. The story focused on Bard’s Recovery filter, which according to government data was responsible for over 300 adverse events, including at least 27 deaths.
Bard eventually pulled its Recovery filter (though not until ten months after an internal report warned about its risks) and came out with its new G2 filter. However, patients continued to experienced problems with the G2 filter, which are among 921 IVC filter adverse event reports identified by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2010. Complaints about Bard’s IVC filters, as well as those of other companies such as Cook Medical, detailed instances of device migration, filter fracture, embolization, and vena caval perforation, many of which proved fatal.
The new lawsuit is set to join over 50 similar Bard IVC filter lawsuits in a multidistrict litigation established last month in the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona. Plaintiffs who have filed Bard IVC filter lawsuits claim that Bard continued to market their defectively designed devices despite knowing the unreasonable risks they posed.