California Girl Testifies About Losing Sight
On June 30, 2008, an 11-year-old Topanga Canyon girl informed a Malibu jury that she can barely remember what it’s like to see, since she was left near-blind and suffering from a painful condition that her parents and doctors claim was caused by a rare, severe allergic reaction to Children’s Motrin.
“It’s hard to remember what seeing is like, when you haven’t been able to see for a long time,” Sabrina Johnson testified during the trial of her family’s lawsuit against Children’s Motrin manufacturer Johnson & Johnson and its subsidiaries.
She and her father testified that Sabrina’s eyes were so painful in any dim light that she once chose to spend several weeks inside a box at her grandparents’ house, near a Florida eye clinic. “It was not a very fun Christmas,” Sabrina said. “Since I was in a box, I was one of the presents.”
The girl suffered chemical burns in her eyes and every orifice of her body after her parents gave her three doses of Children’s Motrin for a slight fever in 2003, when she had come home from Topanga Elementary School with a fever. The reaction sent her to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where even doctors did not know about medical links between the active ingredient in Motrin ibuprofen and the severe reaction called Stevens-Johnson Syndrome (SJS)
A lack of warnings to consumers, and the fact that physicians were not given warnings about the remote possibility of such a violent reaction until 2005, is at the heart of the five-week-long trial of the lawsuit.
The suit accuses Johnson & Johnson and its family of subsidiary companies of putting sales of its ibuprofen painkiller worth $1 billion in profits per year ahead of the extremely rare possibility that a person can be blinded, or killed, as a result of an allergic reaction that is not mentioned on the product’s label.
Johnson & Johnson lawyers have contended that the product is safe, and that warning labels on the box and inside the packaging adequately warned caregivers that they should consult doctors if any change of medical condition occurs after giving a young person Children’s Motrin. During opening statements last week, company attorneys said they will prove that the drug did not cause Sabrina Johnson’s illness.
“That’s my little girl, every day,” Sabrina’s father, Kenneth Johnson, testified earlier as he pointed to a large photo of his daughter clasping blankets tightly to her head as she sat in a dark room. Sabrina endured a two-week hospital stay in which she was in excruciating pain or a morphine haze, her father said.
“I thought we were going to lose her,” Kenneth Johnson said.
Kenneth Johnson, an engineering manager at a top-secret Raytheon government electronics project, said he read the Motrin label before buying it and before dispensing it, and was given no warning that it could cause the severe ibuprofen reaction known as Stevens-Johnson Syndrome (SJS).
“I’m scared to death now that my daughter will end up in some apartment in some city, on a government subsistence check and that scares me to death,” Johnson said, choking back tears.
Johnson & Johnson lawyers agreed today with the family’s attorneys that the girls medical bills over the last five years totaled $534,000.
On the witness stand a former company executive testified that the firm and its subsidiary, McNeil, knew that as many as 20 people had been blinded, killed or seriously injured by Children’s Motrin between the time it was put on the over-the-counter market in the 1990s, and when Sabrina Johnson was given three doses of it in 2003.
Anthony R. Temple, who was executive medical director for Johnson & Johnson’s McNeil Consumer Products subsidiary, said he was also aware that more than 40 cases of Stevens-Johnson Syndrome (SJS) occurred in the years after doctors at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center told the Topanga Canyon family that Motrin had caused Sabrina’s hospitalization, and near-death, and continued terrible pain.
Temple also said the company did not add warnings to the product label after an extensive clinical trial found that it could cause a severe allergic shock similar to a violent bee sting reaction in more than 5 out of every 100,000 children given the drug.
The label warnings were made more severe after doctors petitioned the federal government to add tougher language in 2005. Language about the symptoms of Stevens-Johnson Syndrome (SJS) was added to Children’s Motrin sold via prescriptions, but not the same drug sold over-the-counter, Temple said.
Attorneys from the drug company had no questions for their former employee, who has now retired, but said they may recall Temple when they put on their rebuttal case.
Sabrina Johnson tried to watch on television as her lawyer played videotape of her testimony before a FDA advisory committee in Washington, where the little girl implored rulemakers to “please do something so other children don’t get hurt by Stevens-Johnson Syndrome (SJS) like me. People really need to know about that.”
Sabrina said she is learning Braille and hopes to become a pediatrician or a veterinarian. At her lawyer’s request, she sang a song with the chorus “It’s possible, anything is possible.”
Johnson & Johnson’s attorneys had no questions.