A woman’s $20 million transvaginal surgical mesh award has been cut to $15 million to align with New Jersey laws that limit punitive damages to five times the amount of compensatory damages

Two out of three judges on a Pennsylvania appeals court panel deemed it appropriate to reduce the punitive damages from $17.5 million to $12.5 million because her compensatory damages award was $2.5 million. The third judge thought the $20 million verdict should have been completely reversed. Judge Alice Dubow cited “numerous evidentiary errors that the trial court made” as reasons for her dissension.

Allegations of Transvaginal Surgical Mesh Dangers

Plaintiff Margaret “Peggy” Engleman said she had received Ethicon’s TVT-Secur mesh implant in 2007 to relieve stress urinary incontinence, but she began to experience pain and a recurrence of the incontinence within a month of receiving the surgical mesh, according to a statement issued by her lawyers.

The statement goes on to say the mesh eroded within her body so badly that several surgeries were unable to completely remove pieces of mesh that littered and were embedded inside her abdominal area.

Ethicon is a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, which has been accused of continuing to market transvaginal surgical mesh products even after knowing the material was not biologically compatible with permanent implantation. The TVT-Secur was available from 2006 through 2012.

Ethicon and other manufacturers of transvaginal mesh have been ordered to pay billions of dollars in compensation over the course of the last several years as women have taken them to court.

The mesh devices are like slings, designed to hold the bladder in place to reduce the symptoms of stress urinary incontinence, which is the unintentional release of urine upon coughing, sneezing or laughing that some women experience after childbirth or menopause.

According to trial court documents, Engleman suffered from the TVT-Secur’s erosion into her vaginal wall. After having several surgeries to try to remove all of the mesh, she allegedly continued to suffer from vaginal spasms, sexual dysfunction, pain, and urinary frequency.

Johnson & Johnson’s Ethicon company was able to introduce the TVT-Secur mesh device in 2006 without jumping through the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s normal regulatory hoops of testing and clinical trials. The FDA has a fast-track program that allows new devices that are similar to existing approved medical mechanisms to enter the market more quickly. Ethicon allegedly took the fast-track route to ensure their new, smaller mesh product, the TVT-Secur, beat others to the transvaginal medical mesh competition.

In previous trials, Johnson & Johnson internal emails have shown evidence that staff complained of the “lines between commercial and research” becoming blurred, and that data was allegedly manipulated to favor the company’s findings.

Among women’s most common injuries are vaginal scarring, mesh erosion, mesh perforating the vaginal wall or other organs, infection, constant pain, and continued urinary problems.

The Transvaginal Surgical Mesh Lawsuit is Margaret Engleman v. Ethicon Inc. et al., Case Nos. 3320-EDA-2017 and 3400-EDA-2017, in the Pennsylvania Superior Court.