LOS ANGELES (AFX) - Jury selection began Wednesday in a lawsuit by a California man who claims he suffered a heart attack after taking the painkiller Vioxx -- one of more than 13,000 such claims brought against drug maker Merck & Co. nationwide.
The Southern California man, Stewart Grossberg, claims he took Vioxx for more than two years before he had a heart attack at 66.
His case is the first to go to trial in California and one of some 2,000 filed in the state and consolidated in Los Angeles Superior Court by Judge Victoria G. Chaney.
A judge in New Orleans has been overseeing all the federal lawsuits involving the painkiller.
To handle the large number of Vioxx lawsuits in California, Chaney decided to group a representative number of cases for trial, the outcome of which could serve as a guide in other cases or, potentially, in settlement talks between the parties.
The initial group included four cases involving plaintiffs who claim they suffered a heart attack after taking Vioxx. One of the cases was dismissed, while another was continued because the plaintiff's attorney is involved in another Vioxx case out of state.
That left Grossberg's case and that of Rudolph Arrigale, 76, of Orange County, who claims he took Vioxx for five months and then suffered a heart attack that left him permanently injured.
The two cases were set to be tried simultaneously but Chaney severed them Tuesday after attorneys for Whitehouse Station, N.J.-based Merck argued that they needed more time for discovery because of the potential of new medical evidence surfacing in Arrigale's case, said Thomas Brandi, a San Francisco attorney representing Arrigale.
'The upshot of it was she's rolling our case over to the next wave of trials,' Brandi said Wednesday.
Calls to the company and Grossberg's attorney, Thomas Girardi in Los Angeles, were not immediately returned Wednesday.
Merck put Vioxx on the market in 1999 as a treatment for arthritis and acute pain in adults.
It pulled the drug from the market in September 2004 after the company said research showed Vioxx doubled risk of heart attacks and strokes with long-term use.
Grossberg's case is the eighth to go to trial nationwide. Another trial is ongoing in Atlantic City, N.J.
In that case, the plaintiff blames Vioxx for the heart attack she suffered in January 2004 after taking the drug for 2 1/2 years.
In the six verdicts to date, three have gone in favor of Merck and three others against the drug maker, eliciting multimillion-dollar jury awards.
Merck has said it plans to appeal, and has vowed to fight each of the cases it faces nationwide one by one.
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