NAS Baby Lawsuit

NAS baby lawsuit offers hope to families ravaged by America’s opioid crisis

By Donald Creadore

Few women in the United States have seen the effects of the opioid-abuse crisis on the nation’s kids like Kathy Strain. After her children struggled with addiction, the Berks County, Pennsylvania, woman turned her anger and anxiety into activism – especially on behalf of a growing number of grandparents unexpectedly raising babies who are suffering the lasting health impacts of exposure to opioids in the womb.

“It really is a big group of kids, with all of the issues, and nobody knows,” said Strain. She is talking about the estimated 250,000 children born every year in America diagnosed with Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome, or NAS, as well as other health or developmental issues caused by opioid exposure. or NAS – a medical diagnosis assigned to the hundreds of thousands of U.S. kids exposed to opioids as a fetus developing in their mother’s womb.

Strain – who was once a Pennsylvania moderator for a popular internet message board called The Addict’s Mom – talks regularly to family members who worry about physical symptoms like clenched jaws or grinding teeth in their children, or see developmental or psychological difficulties such as attention-deficit problems, autism-like symptoms or memory issues.

It’s because of her work and dedication to families struggling with the ill-effects of in utero opioid exposure Strain is now a leading national advocate for an NAS baby lawsuit – a legal effort launched in late 2019 by a non-profit group that aims to hold responsible the large pharmaceutical companies that caused the opioid crisis, including paying for the massive cost of monitoring these children and making sure they receive proper care.

“We owe it to these kids — and future generations – to develop a tracking system and to study and see why developmental delays and defects may be happening with these children,” said Strain, referring to the lawsuit’s demand for a medical monitoring fund to follow children diagnosed with NAS or other opioid-related injuries.

Strain believes that the Nation’s surge in the number of prescriptions of opioid painkillers, and its ready availability, can be traced back to aggressive marketing tactics by these large pharmaceutical companies which, most alarmingly and egregiously, continued well after the addictive qualities of these drugs and their adverse impacts upon children had become evident to industry. .

NAS injures 250,000 babies every year

It’s been reported that about one-in-three pregnant women in America — or roughly 1.3 million out of the 3.8 million women annually — were given a prescription for opioid painkillers. Our legal team has done the math and determined that a baby with serious problems due to opioid exposure is born somewhere in the United States every 15-20 minutes. That would mean about 250,000 babies requiring specialized treatment are born every year – a number that’s been grossly underestimated by the federal government. The absence of uniform diagnostic and reporting protocols, coupled with underreporting and misdiagnosis by medical workers, unintentional or otherwise, are responsible for gross inaccuracies that unfairly and unjustifiably punish newborn children.

Dr. Brent Bell has analyzed NAS research from around the globe as a retained expert for the Opioid Justice Team and, according to him “the amount of opioid use, the time of exposure in the pregnancy and the length of exposure may show up years later in social, interactive, behavioral, cognitive and educational deficits of the child, even if the born child tests negative.

Despite the pervasiveness of the country’s opioid crisis, there’s been far too little reporting and debate about the medical impacts and sufferings, both short-term and long-term, upon children exposed to opioids in utero as a developing fetus. The most frequent diagnosis is NAS, arising from clinical observation and monitoring, following birth, of its most common conditions manifesting themselves in various forms, including but not limited to body shakes, excessive crying or yawns, feeding problems, diarrhea, sleeping problems, fever, or a runny nose.

Also reported, albeit infrequently, are reports of birth defects (related to opioid exposure in utero), such as club foot, spina bifida, heart defects, cleft palate, hydrocephalus, esophageal atresia, gastroschisis, anorectal atresia, or diaphragmatic hernia. And as these opioid-exposed children mature, many experience behavioral problems, cognitive delays, mental or motor deficits, or attention-deficit disorder (ADD), among other maladies.

Fighting the stigma of opioid addiction

After first learning of her children’s struggle Strain was so distraught and paralyzed by fear, she lost her job and was forced to collect unemployment benefits. Strain decided to become an activist because of this experience and her realization of the lack of resources available to families, like hers. Despite her best efforts to become educated on addiction and best practices, her middle son died from an overdose while he was seeking treatment. But, to her credit, she overcame her fears of public speaking and began her mission to warn other parents about the dangers of opioids. “I didn’t want any family to experience the shame and the stigma that I’d felt,”, says Strain.

Strain is now a local leader with Not One More, a family support group, in addition to acting as a moderator on popular websites for parents and grandparents. To her further credit, Strain now works for a non-profit grant funded program in Pennsylvania on a program aimed at ending substance use in the workplace and educating employers on what issues employees that have a loved one struggling with addiction may be experiencing. The plight of Strain’s family, like many of the families belonging to her friends and co-workers, is not unusual within her community, nor nationwide. To the contrary, the impact on America’s adults is both mindboggling and sweeping. Sadly, over 400,000 Americans have reportedly died from opioids during the period of 1999-2017 (from opioids obtained legally in addition to illegal street drugs). This figure is roughly equal to the number of U.S. soldiers killed in World War II, to provide some perspective to the enormity of the current opioid health crisis.

In addition, the number of children removed from their parents’ custody and placed in foster care or with relatives has spiked- for example, in Vermont, that number grew by 40% from 2013 to 2016. Similarly, nearly 7,000 West Virginia children find themselves in state care today, a 70% increase from a decade ago.

Strain says there’s still a lot of work to be done in educating would-be mothers, as well as the doctors and medical staff who treat them, about the risks of opioid use while pregnant upon their fetus. . “Women of child-bearing age and, especially, those women seeking to conceive or are pregnant, need to be made fully aware of the danger posed by their use of opioids.” she said. “That wasn’t happening, and I don’t know that that’s happening now.”

In March, the lawyers of the Opioid Justice Team filed in federal court a request for a preliminary injunction requiring women of child-bearing age to test negative for pregnancy as a condition to prescribing her an opioid product.

It’s hardly a radical idea. Especially when one considers that doctors in the United States who treat young women of child-bearing age for acne are already being required to administer a urine pregnancy test before prescribing Accutane, a drug that’s been positively linked to birth defects. This protocol is uniform and, as importantly, demonstrates that doctors, patients, pharmacies and the big pharmaceutical companies are all perfectly capable of acting affirmatively and in the public interest towards protecting young mothers, fetal development, and improving outcomes for both the mother and her newborn.

Yet this simple, common-sense idea – which could dramatically reduce the number of babies exposed to opioids in the womb – remains on hold.

NAS baby lawsuit offers a shot at justice

In the federal court case, our team of attorneys is fighting hard to get children born to mothers that has used opioids while pregnant to become recognized as their own legal class within the national opioid litigation, which is currently before U.S. District Court Judge Daniel A. Polster in Cleveland, Ohio. The same team of lawyers has also filed lawsuits in nearly 40 states, each one also seeking recognition for the legal rights of these kids and their families.

The aim of the NAS babies’ lawsuit is a legal settlement, whereby pharmaceutical companies that had manufactured and aggressively marketed these painkillers – including Purdue Pharma, the firm behind Oxycontin – contribute funds necessary to establish and administer a medical monitoring fund for these children, one of the main goals of family-health-activists such as Strain. The same companies would also be required to provide funding for long-term health care, therapies, counseling and tutoring.

Many of the lawyers on our team vividly memories of a similar case that occurred two decades ago – the lawsuit against Big Tobacco companies, seeking justice in the form of compensation for the decades of harm caused by cigarette smoking, and the failure to warn the public about those health risks. The chief plaintiffs in that case were state and local governments, and the settlement (in the late 1990s) resulted a multi-billion-dollar windfall that only led to government entities spending the money to plug holes in their budgets rather than assisting the victims of smoking, as intended. North Carolina, most brazenly, spent 75 percent of its settlement money to bolster tobacco production

In fighting for justice on behalf of opioid-exposed children, our goal is to make sure that history doesn’t repeat itself in the current case against Big Pharma, even as many of the same states and localities are back again at the bargaining table. That’s why we sought meaningful representation concerning the ongoing settlement talks occurring in Cleveland, as well as in the ongoing bankruptcy case involving Purdue Pharma, to ensure these NAS-affected children have a voice.

There is still an opportunity for new plaintiffs to join other families and our team of attorneys in the lawsuits filed behalf on behalf of children exposed to opioids in utero and their guardians. I hope you’ll join us and help us make sure that any national financial settlement over the opioid crisis goes to the families and the communities that need help as this generation of kids grows up.

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