SACRAMENTO, Calif. (Legal Newsline) - Consumer goods company Church & Dwight says class action lawyers leapt before they looked, when they found out they could sue the makers of cold medicines containing phenylephrine.
The decongestant was the target of an FDA advisory that said it was not effective in treating congestion. A rush of class action lawsuits followed by consumers who say they were duped into buying products containing.
One such company facing litigation is Church & Dwight, the parent company of brands like Arm & Hammer and OxiClean. It acquired the Zicam brand earlier this century but discontinued sale of products containing phenylephrine 15 years ago.
"In a rush to join the dozens of phenylephrine cases recently filed across the country, Plaintiffs' counsel scoured the internet for any nasal decongestant ever sold that might have contained phenylephrine," a Nov. 7 motion to dismiss in California federal court says.
The plaintiffs in that case can't answer Church & Dwight's request for information regarding any of their Zicam purchases, the company says.
"This is no surprise since few people, if any, would recall buying a particular cold relief product 15 or 20 years ago," the motion says. "This passage of time dooms Plaintiffs' claims against Church & Dwight for another reason.
"Because any purchases that Plaintiffs might have made the Purported Zicam PE Products would have been well over a decade ago, the relevant statutes of limitations have lapsed."
Arguments that the statute of limitations should have been tolled fail, Church & Dwight argues, because with reasonable diligence the plaintiffs could have uncovered the alleged fraud.
"(T)he efficacy of orally administered phenylephrine has been publicly debated for years, which, at a minimum, should have caused Plaintiffs and their counsel to investigate the issues alleged in the complaint," the motion says.
The lawsuit at issue was filed by Christopher Rodriguez and Andrew Bluth of Singleton Schreiber in Sacramento.
It alleges consumers have suffered hundreds of millions of dollars in damages due to their reliance on the deceptive and fraudulent representations made by defendants like Johnson & Johnson, GlaxoSmithKline and Proctor & Gamble.
The suit claims consumers would not have spent their "hard-earned money" to purchase the products to help with congestion if the defendants had not claimed they work for the purpose of relieving congestion due to cold and flu symptoms.