After a long process judicial, a french court determined that the certifier of defective breast prostheses Poly Implant Prothèse (PIP) will have to compensate 605 women for a total of more than 10 million euros. Between 2001 and 2010 there were around 400,000 victims of these prostheses that were not approved for medical use, many of them in Latin America, where complaints were filed in countries such as Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela.
In 2018, 1,319 women, mostly British, sued the company in a civil court room in Nanterre, outside Paris. Finally, the magistrates resolved to “condemn German society TÜV Rheinland to compensate 605 of them for the damages they suffered,” said the president of the court.
In May, the French Court of Cassation confirmed the responsibility of TÜV, a global provider of technical, safety and certification services, in the scandal and opened the way to compensation for certain victims.
The Nanterre court stressed that “the incoherence, since 2002, between amount of gel ordered (per PIP) and the number of prostheses produced had constituted an anomaly evident in the manufacturing process” and that TÜV I should have detected it.
Scandal: defective breast prostheses left 400,000 victims worldwide
The case broke out in 2010 when the French regulator detected an abnormal rate of rupture of prostheses manufactured by Poly Implant Prothèse (PIP) with a silicone gel not approved for medical use and normally used in electronic equipment.
In total, almost a million of these prostheses were implanted between 2001 and 2010. The number of victims in the world is estimated at 400,000many of them in Latin America, where they were presented complaints in countries such as Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela.
In 2019, PIP founder Jean-Claude Mas died and thus the proceedings against the French company ended. However, the German certifier, which did not detect the flaws, had to face the complaints.
The company’s lawyer, Christelle Coslin, rejected that the responsibility of the German certifier dates back to 2002 and told AFP that he will advise his client appeal the court decision.
The testimony of an Argentine woman affected by PIP silicones
Barbara de Amonarraizone of the Argentine women who is part of the international class action lawsuit for the placement of defective PIP breast implants, recalled in a note from October last year the panic she felt when she found out that they were filled with an adulterated product and said that she thought who was dying: “I burst into tears and became desperate because I felt like I had a time bomb in my body.”
The woman who is now 63 years old had to have a breast replacement in 2007 and on the advice of her plastic surgeon decided to have “new, better, French (implants)” which, she confesses, “ruined her life” since she had to subsequently undergo several surgeries and outpatient medical procedures to drain seromas and suffered psychological disorders due to feeling that “He could die at any moment.”
Amonarraiz recounted his reaction upon hearing on the radio what had happened with the PIP implants and the World Health Organization (WHO) recommendation to remove them. “I called the doctor to explain the situation and ask for the serial number. He answered that he was no longer attending and that he had closed the clinic,” she remembered and there began a path of comings and goings of medical consultations that led her to a new surgeon: Alberto Ferriolswho performed the prosthesis replacement.
“I started seeing different affected people on television and I found Deborah Roilettea French lawyer who lived in Argentina for a long time and who shouldered the lawsuit, helped us a lot,” she said, and assured that being in contact with other women who experienced similar situations helped her change her way of thinking.
“Today I think that the most important thing is health, not beauty and the only thing I recommend to those who have undergone interventions is that they not be ashamed, there are many women who have something in their body that can kill them and they need to know it, but also They have to claim what belongs to them, it is their right,” he had emphasized. she emphasized.
Source: Ambito
