PARIS. The ruling of a French court of appeal recognized the right to compensation for the 2,700 women who underwent the implantation of defective breast implants, produced by the company Poly Implant Prothèse (Ppi). The same court also confirmed a conviction for negligence for a second company, the German Tuv Rheinland, for having produced the false European certifications attesting to the safety and reliability of PPI prostheses.
The lawsuit, which lasted over ten years and generated a scandal of vast proportions around the world, could now also have consequences for the other thousands of women who have had these prostheses implanted and have not yet reported. According to Bbc between 2001 and 2010 it is estimated that at least 400,000 women – of which 60,000 in Colombia and 47,000 in the United Kingdom – received these defective implants: studies have shown that over time the prostheses tended to break, releasing the silicone gel. industrial type in the organism, not suitable for human use.
The group of women who filed the lawsuit were shown to have run into health problems caused by industrial silicone. Among them is Jan Spivey, one of the 580 plaintiffs of British nationality, who after undergoing a double mastectomy due to cancer, received PPI implants. Soon after, he began to experience pain in the joints, back and head, suffering from feelings of suffocation and states of anxiety. Even when removed, twenty years later, the woman declared that those implants “continue to have negative effects on physical and psychological health“.
The woman said that before realizing that it was the prostheses that caused those problems, she went through a period of great suffering: “not knowing why I was so sick was terrible”. Once the reason was understood, “I couldn’t believe how doctors could have inserted those things into my body.”
It was the Agence Française de Sécurité sanitari des produits de Santé who first denounced the dangerousness of the prostheses of the PPI company, after having received reports of damage to health and also some cases of suspicious deaths. Having obtained investigations, in 2010 the agency ordered their immediate withdrawal from the market and arranged for all the women who had received them – no less than 30,000 – to be recalled to the hospital to obtain the removal and replacement.
THE CASE
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Pip refounded with a new name
The PPI was immediately closed and its owner has already been sentenced to prison. Investigations by the French judiciary revealed that the company, based in Provence, had accumulated a large budget deficit and therefore had opted for the purchase of substandard materials to continue producing the sanitary devices.
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