Documents Indicate Guidant Covered Up Defibrillator Problems
Six months before the Guidant Corporation publicly disclosed short circuits in its heart devices, a debate may have been going on within the company over whether to alert doctors about such failures, internal company documents released yesterday suggest.
The documents appear to indicate that some Guidant executives recommended in January 2005 that the company find a way to tell doctors about the failures posed by a device known as the Contak Renewal, an advanced heart defibrillator. The records, which were disclosed yesterday as part of a court proceeding in Texas, include handwritten notes said to have been composed by a top Guidant executive.
Guidant started receiving a small but growing number of reports of short circuits in Contak Renewals in late 2004, more than two years after it discovered a similar problem in another defibrillator, the Prizm 2 DR.
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