Yaz Featured on Canada's Consumer Investigative News Show 'Marketplace'
While as many as 4,800 women in Canada and the United States already have filed lawsuits against Bayer, the manufacturer of the popular birth control pills Yaz and Yasmin, this number is expected to rise after Yaz was featured on the Canadian news show “Marketplace.”
In a segment titled "Spinning a Pill," co-host Erica Johnson interviewed a group of young women that either had taken currently were taking Yaz and experienced serious health problems. Of those young women, one was a university student that has developed a blood clot in her lungs as a result of taking Yaz. She was diagnosed with a pulmonary embolism. In fact, there were women interviewed that seemed to have a story for every side effect that has been the subject of the various lawsuits filed against Bayer.
Another woman profiled starting taking Yaz for treatment of her PMS (as Yaz was advertised to help with but not FDA-approved for) had problems with her gallbladder and had to have surgery to correct it. While the show’s co-host stated that Bayer originally had agreed to do an interview, company officials changed their mind and suggested that the show speak to a doctor whose opinion was that research designed to show Yaz to be more dangerous than other birth control pills was as yet inconclusive and flawed.
Susan Jick from Boston University disagreed with Bayer's statement, saying, "those flaws (in the study), had they been corrected, in fact, the risks might have been even higher than they already showed." Jick also is planning to publish two studies that she did herself on the subject. During the interview, she hinted that the results of her research will actually end up being more consistent with newer information from more recent studies that are suggesting that there is a small, yet higher risk of patients experiencing blood clots while taking Yasmin.
