Pelvic mesh implant manufacturer Johnson & Johnson group has reached a $300m settlement in two class actions, after thousands of women worldwide reported complications from the mesh products including chronic pain, painful sexual intercourse and incontinence.
It marks the largest settlement in a product liability class action in Australian history, and is subject to federal court approval.
The court found that while medical goods can not all be risk-free, patient should expect those devices to carry appropriate warnings about risks even if those risks are rare.
Similar class actions involving thousands of women are also under way in the UK and US. In 2018 the then Australian health minister Greg Hunt issued a national apology on behalf of the government to women affected by the transvaginal mesh scandal, after a Senate inquiry into transvaginal mesh procedures found many women experienced great difficulty in finding medical practitioners who believed that the symptoms they were experiencing were a result of the mesh, and that the symptoms were as severe as they described.
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