Zantac Cancer Lawsuits | Jan 2021 Latest Update (in text)

Thousands of Zantac cancer lawsuits are expected to be filed over the next few years. Our law firm is accepting cases from people who regularly used Zantac (or generic ranitidine) and were subsequently diagnosed with cancer.

What is the backstory? The purpose of Zantac is to help patients who have heartburn, sour stomach, acid reflux or gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), or other GI issues. By all accounts, it works for this purpose.

But we recently discovered Zantac contains dangerously high levels of the cancer-causing chemical NDMA. Since the late 70s, we have known that NDMA is bad stuff. Animal testing showed that it causes cancer. So NDMA is banned in the U.S. with limited exceptions for research. This stuff is pure poison to humans. No one really disputes this. Instead, the battle in these cases is going to be just how much NDMA was in Zantac.

How Did This Happen?

How did this sneak up on us? It is a good question. There is a lot of blame to go around, certainly. The FDA and drugmakers are first in line. I’m also amazed that plaintiffs’ lawyers were so slow to pick up the clues. There was a study in 2016 that found that during the 24 hours after the patients took the drug, the NDMA in the patient’s urine increased 400 times. That is insane. I can see why the drug companies would turn a blind eye to this. But so did the FDA and every single plaintiffs’ lawyer. But there was little public commentary and connecting of the dots.

What the Lawsuits Allege

There are other NDMA contamination causes where there was a manufacturing mistake and NDMA got in the drug. This is what happened in the Valsartan cases. But the Zantac cases appear to be something very different. The Zantac NDMA problem appears to be a fundamental problem in the way the chemicals in Zantac metabolize in the body. Because there is at least some evidence suggesting that when ingested, Zantac forms levels on NDMA far beyond what doctors say is the NDMA limit before you put yourself at serious risk of cancer.

How do we know this? The FDA was protecting us? Ah, no. Valisure, an online pharmacy, notified the FDA that it had done its own testing of Zantac. It found that Zantac and generic ranitidine tablets had NDMA at levels thousands of times higher than the FDA’s own permissible daily intake limit.

The Valisure tests did not look at whether something can happen to ranitidine to increase the risk of cancer. In January 2020, a California lab, Emery Pharma, reported that Zantac may produce higher levels of NDMA when exposed to heat for five days. So there may be a lot of variables at play as to why the NDMA in Zantac could expose people to cancer.

The Class Action

Last month (November 2019), the Plaintiffs in six federal lawsuits asked a panel of judges to put Zantac in what we call an MDL. This is a “kinda class action” lawsuit where the claims are centralized under one judge for proceeds before trial. So if you file a Zantac lawsuit in any federal court in the country, the claims are all sent to one federal court judge for the initial handling of the case. This is good news for plaintiffs because it allows lawyers to merge their efforts to make a case. The only bad news is that an MDL does move slower than a regular case which slows down settlement.

Getting a Lawyer

Many Zantac users who have been diagnosed with cancer are now looking back and questions, with good reason, whether Zantac may have been a contributing cause.

If you have a potential Zantac cancer lawsuit, call us at 800-553-8082. We can help you.

This is our website page on Zantac:
https://www.millerandzois.com/zantac-cancer.html

This is Ron Miller’s blog post: