Report: Johnson and Johnson knew of hip failure years before recall

Johnson & Johnson was aware of the significant failure rates of its ASR hip implants a year before the company stopped manufacturing them and two years before they were recalled according to a Wall Street Journal report. This information comes from unsealed documents in one of J&J’s 10,000 lawsuits over the all-metal hip replacements including an internal note from 2011 which says that the company expected 36% of the devices to fail within 5 years far exceeding the generally accepted failure rate of 5% for hip implants. Metal on metal hip implants were prone to chafe and flake off metal bits into the bloodstream exposing patients to risks of tissue death and toxicity. Now, the company is also facing more litigation over Pinnacle, its still on the market metal hip implant which fails at a rate of about 10%, still exceeding the failure rate of other implants. The FDA put out a recent warning concerning metal on metal implants proposing new regulations which would require manufacturers to demonstrate their safety or have them removed from the market. So far J&J has refused to settle its lawsuits. Jeffrey Newman represents whistleblowers.