Actor Dennis Quaid claims drugmaker Baxter Healthcare Corp. was to blame when Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles administered a thousand times the intended dose of the blood thinner heparin to his infant twins. The celebrity filed a lawsuit this week in Cook County, Ill., against the Deerfield, Ill.-based company.
Baxter spokeswoman Deborah Spak, while declining to respond directly to the lawsuit, said in an interview that the “issue here is about improper use of a product.” She cited a statement issued two days after the Nov. 18 incident by Cedars-Sinai Chief Medical Officer Michael Langberg attributing the error to the 855-bed hospital’s staff. “This was a preventable error, involving a failure to follow our standard policies and procedures, and there is no excuse for that to occur at Cedars-Sinai,” Langberg said in the written statement. The Quaid children had been hospitalized for staph infections, according to published reports.
Quaid’s lawsuit claims that Baxter’s packaging of the drug was “unreasonably dangerous” because the drastically different doses came in vials with the same size and shape, and had labels with a blue background. The complaint also alleges the company was negligent because it failed to recall and repackage the product or issue an “urgent warning” to providers based on previous errors involving the drug.
Baxter in September rolled out new safeguards in its heparin packaging, Spak noted, adding that the move was not a response to confusion reported by providers. “We look continually at the labeling and packaging of all our products,” Spak said. -- by Gregg Blesch
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