No one would argue with the premise. The question is whether someone with no discernible injury from a product has a cause of action, based solely on the possibility that an injury may become manifest in the future. The suit, Vadino v. American Home Products seeks echocardiographic testing of the 94,400 New Jersey residents who took the diet drugs for more than three weeks before they were taken off the market in September 1997. Worse for the manufacturers, it puts them on the hook for both the monitoring costs and any injuries that the monitoring discloses. The women lost weight while using a combination of the drugs, but also experienced symptoms such as shortness of breath after taking the pills, according to the suit.
Tobacco use causes emphysema, cancers and chronic pulmonary diseases.
Early detection will help save lives. Bottinelli says he'll file a class-action suit seeking medical monitoring and cessation programs for New Jersey's 1.75 million smokers. But it will be an uphill battle. In November, a week before the state Attorney General's Office accepted the tobacco settlement, a Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel dismissed a class-action medical monitoring suit brought on behalf of two million Pennsylvania smokers. In Barnes v. The American Tobacco Co., 97-1844, the court held the case could not proceed as a class action because it entailed too many issues relating to whether each smoker was addicted to nicotine.