Jury awards $8M in metal hip implant suit
LOS ANGELESA jury in Los Angeles has awarded more than $8 million to a man who accused Johnson & Johnson's DePuy Orthopaedics subsidiary of knowingly marketing a faulty hip implant that was later recalled.
Jurors on Friday awarded the damages in 65-year-old Loren Kransky's negligence and defective design suit.
It's the first of thousands of similar cases that attorneys say left people with crippling problems or in need of other replacement surgeries.
Defense attorneys argued Kransky had a host of pre-existing health ailments and the hip implant didn't make him worse.
The all-metal ball-and-socket hip joint was sold for eight years to more than 90,000 people worldwide and pulled from the market two years ago.
Last year, British experts at the world's biggest artificial joint registry said doctors should stop using metal-on-metal hip replacements after a study found that, after five years, about 6 percent of people who had used them needed surgery to fix or replace them.
That compares with just 1.7 to 2.3 percent of people who had ceramic or plastic joints.