Mass Torts: State of the Art : Mass Torts Lawyer & Attorney : Vorys, Sater, Seymour & Pease Law Firm : Toxic Torts & Wrongful Death

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There's an epidemic of immune disorders in America.  Allergies (especially food allergies), asthma, atopy, hypersensitivity disorders including Stevens Johnson Syndrome, Crohn's disease, type1 diabetes, obesity and more are being laid at the feet of perinatal use of antibiotics.  Evidence is mounting rapidly that the use of antibiotics in newborns or their mothers disrupts the intestinal microbiota essential to a well-functioning immune system. The consequences are seen in the host of immune-related disorders which have become perhaps the most significant cause of morbidity and mortality in the United States today.  For a new primer try: Perinatal Programming of Asthma: The Role of Gut Microbiota.

So what should we make of a drug that when first administered saved a young woman, allowing her to have a family and to live to 90* and yet which (because the role that gut bacteria play in generating a healthy immune system was decades away from being known) would eventually precipitate a wave of autoimmune disease in the United States?  If antibiotics are indeed responsible for as many cases of debilitating illness as is now widely suspected, should we ban them and vilify their makers?  Should their makers be driven to ruin by our tort system to ensure that nothing like penicillin is ever unleashed on the public again?  Or should we instead finally recognize that we must take the good with the bad;  that with every advance comes risk; and, that unintended consequences, the nature and extent of which may not be known for years to come, is the price of progress?

* The First American Civilian Saved by Penicillin

The first U.S. civilian whose life was saved by penicillin died in June 1999 at the age of 90 years. In March 1942, a 33-year-old woman was hospitalized for a month with a life-threatening streptococcal infection at a New Haven, Connecticut, hospital. She was delirious, and her temperature reached almost 107 F (41.6 C). Treatments with sulfa drugs, blood transfusions, and surgery had no effect.

As a last resort, her doctors injected her with a tiny amount of an obscure experimental drug called penicillin. Her hospital chart, now at the Smithsonian Institution, indicates a sharp overnight drop in temperature; by the next day she was no longer delirious. She survived to marry, raise a family, and meet Sir Alexander Fleming, the scientist who discovered penicillin. In 1945, Fleming was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine, along with Ernst Chain and Howard Florey, who helped develop penicillin into a widely available medical product.