Depuy Hip Implant Recall

On August 26, 2010, the DePuy Orthopaedics company, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, issued a voluntary depuy hip recall of two hip replacement systems. About 93,000 of the devices have been implanted worldwide, according to a DePuy spokesperson.

The depuy hip implants are known as the ASR XL Acetabular System and DePuy ASR Hip Resurfacing System. The chances are that one out of eight of the implants will fail, requiring painful and expensive hip revision surgery.

Too late

The first depuy lawsuit filed in the United States against DePuy over these defective depuy asr hip implant was in March, 2009 — almost 18 months before the device was recalled. Another depuy lawsuit quoted in a news article states: “Officials of J&J’s DePuy Orthopaedics unit knew for years many of the 93,000 patients with ASR hip implants required corrective surgeries.”

In fact, the Food & Drug Administration had received over 500 complaints about these depuy hip implants over the past few years

Late in 2009, DePuy announced it was phasing out the depuy hip implants because of slow sales. But in March, the company warned doctors that the depuy hip implants might have a high failure rate in some patients. As one doctor said succinctly, “It is way too late.”

So, despite depuy lawsuits beginning nearly a year and a half before, years of complaints to the FDA, and warnings to doctors in March, DePuy waited until the end of August 2010 to issue the hip replacement recall.

Furthermore, stopping production of the devices more than eight months before the hip replacement recall has been compared to a “phantom recall,” in which Johnson & Johnson hired contractors to secretly buy back tens of thousands of packets of defective Motrin. That recall and a spate of others were the focus of a congressional hearing September 30, 2010, where federal regulators testified that Johnson & Johnson repeatedly did not investigate and fix problems with its medicines.

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