LIVINGSTON COUNTY (WWJ) The former pharmacy owner responsible for the 2012 nationwide fungal meningitis outbreak that killed at least eleven Michigan residents, and forever changed the lives of hundreds more, has been sentenced to 10 to 15 years in prison.
Barry Cadden; 57, former owner of New England Compounding Center (NECC) in Framingham, Massachusetts; pled no contest in March to 11 counts of involuntary manslaughter for the deaths of at least as many Michigan residents. He was sentenced in Livingston County 44th Circuit Court on Friday (5/10).
The victims received the tainted epidural steroid injections (methylprednisolone), produced at the NECC in a suburb of Boston, at the Michigan Pain Specialists Clinic in Livingston County 12 years ago. The injections infected their recipients with fungal meningitis.
Donna Kruzich, Paula Brent, Lyn Laperriere, Mary Plettl, Gayle Gipson, Patricia Malafouris, Emma Todd, Jennie Barth, Ruth Madouse, Salley Roe, and Karina Baxter lost their lives.
“The families of these 11 victims will forever bear the weight of Mr. Cadden’s greed and disregard for basic standards that caused this horrific tragedy,” Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said in a press release. “We can’t bring them back, but with this sentence, I hope the victims' families now have a sense of closure and bad actors know my office will ensure they are held accountable.”
The fungal meningitis outbreak impacted and caused deaths in nearly two dozen states. Michigan was one of the hardest hit.
In 2017, a jury convicted Cadden in federal court on 57 criminal charges (including racketeering, conspiracy, mail fraud, and introduction of misbranded drugs into state commerce with the intent to defraud and mislead), and he was eventually sentenced to 14 and a half years in jail. The sentence he received Friday will be served at the same time as the federal sentence, and will not add-on any additional jail time.
According to the Associated Press, Michigan is the only state to prosecute Cadden, and senior pharmacist, Glenn Chin, for the deaths.
Cadden “disregarded sterility procedures in the compounding of sterile medications and an egregiously unsafe manner, endorsing laboratory directives wherein cleaning records and scientific testing results were regularly forged and fabricated,” Nessel’s office said in the release.
A 60 Minutes Investigation in 2013 dug deeper into the business practices of Cadden, pinpointing a critical rule that prosecutors said Cadden and his team broke.
“Compounding pharmacies are bound by one rule,” Scott Pelley said during the report. “They must have a prescription for each individual patient. But NECC was shipping tens of thousands of vials from its lab called Clean Room One.”
The report from the United States Attorney General Office said that the NECC repeatedly shipped drugs without valid prescriptions-- using fake or celebrity names to cover themselves like "Michael Jackson", "Homer Simpson" or "Diana Ross."
Video published by the Tennessean shows a mattress junkyard located directly behind the NECC, also owned by the Cadden family. Their report said that investigators found mold and bacteria inside the pharmacy, and "yellow and green residue" on the equipment used to process the medicine.
In 1998, Congress exempted compounding pharmacies from the oversight of the Food and Drug Administration. (State Health Departments regulate the compounding labs).
14 years later, the NECC shipped steroid injections tainted with a black fungus to nearly half a dozen states.
All it took was one shot.
For those sickened, their caregivers, and loved ones left behind; the suffering has been immeasurable.
In a 2016 article by the Washington Post, William Mazure, of Jackson, described how the tainted shot altered him from a heavy-equipment operator who loved to hunt and fish to a man struggling on disability, his short-term memory “mostly gone.”
Julie Otto, also of Michigan, told Scott Pelley back in 2013: “I have been in the hospital seven times. A total of 75 days. I’ve missed Thanksgiving and Christmas, and my son’s birthday.”
In a separate 2013 report by CBS News, Dawn Elliot of Indiana, said: “At times, I cried out and begged for God to help or take me.”
The high doses anti-fungal medications; which many of the victims compared to the brutality of chemotherapy; to treat the meningitis caused side effects like hair loss, weight loss, and severe pain that forced some to need morphine.
Traci Maccoux, of Minnesota, was only 23 when she received the tainted injections. In the same report, her mother wrote of her daughter's nightmare: "In the hospital, the hallucinations began from Voriconazole. She had to have spine surgery to remove a spacer she had because of the fungus. She was forced to drop out of college, could not drive for a year, spent 40 days in the hospital and nine months on Voriconazole...and has medical bills almost up to $500,000."
Maccoux passed away last year at the age of 32. It's not clear if her death was directly related to the fungal meningitis. Her obituary lists her cause of death as "infection complications."
At least 64 deaths across the country are blamed on the tainted injections (some entities, including the United States District Attorney's Office District of Massachusetts, have listed the death toll at over 100). They sickened at least 750 others. However, the snowball effect can never truly be measured.
“We all depend on safe medications,” Nessel said. “Whether it’s a child needing antibiotics, a parent receiving life-saving treatment, or a grandmother in desperate need of pain relief, every patient deserves to know their medications will help them, not kill them.”