LAS VEGAS (AP) - A lawyer is asking a Nevada civil court jury to award $1 billion in punitive damages against a drug manufacturer and distributor found liable for a man's illness in a Las Vegas hepatitis C outbreak.
The jury resumes deliberations Friday. On Wednesday, jurors decided Teva Parenteral Medicine and Baxter Healthcare Services must pay 62-year-old Henry Chanin and his wife, Lorraine, more than $5 million in compensatory damages for breach of implied warranty and failure to warn.
The companies accused of providing supersized vials of the anesthetic reused by endoscopy clinics at the heart of a hepatitis C outbreak.
Chanin contracted the incurable liver disease during a procedure in 2006.
His Clark County District Court lawsuit was the first of hundreds of outbreak-related cases to reach trial.