“I’ve had health problems all my life – and it’s all because of a pill my mother took”

A Bristol woman has opened up about the health problems she has suffered throughout her life and believes they are all the result of pills her mother took when she was pregnant. Tracy Whiting, 53, from St George, said her mother was prescribed the over-the-counter hormone pregnancy test (HPT) pills when she was pregnant with her.

“At 19, I went to the doctor with some pain. I went through a scan and that’s when they found out that my left kidney had not grown,” said Tracy. “I had keyhole surgery and they found that half of my abdomen was crushed.

“And things started to come up as I got older. And I had problems with kidney pain, I had kidney stones, kidney functions, but it’s a big kidney. It gives me trouble because it’s big.”

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Tracy’s mother recalled taking the pills after reading an article about the dangers of Primodos.

“We have my mother’s medical record and it turns out she took Primodos and was given those two tablets. The doctor had told her, if you’re bleeding, you’re not pregnant. Basically, like a miscarriage. medicine to see if you are pregnant or not.

“Then it all made sense because my sister is fine. He has two kidneys. There is nothing wrong with her womb. He just didn’t have the health problems that I have. My sister is three years younger, and until my mother was pregnant with my sister, they stopped doing the Primodos tests.”

Tracy was unable to carry children due to problems with her womb. Primodos was a hormone-based pregnancy test used in the 1960s and 1970s. It was also used to treat amenorrhea, which is the absence of menstruation.

Some mothers have lost their babies after birth and I believe this was caused by taking Primodos in early pregnancy. An All Party Parliamentary Group report on hormone pregnancy tests included the voices of families affected by Primodos.

In 1967, a pediatrician at Queen Mary’s Hospital in London, Dr. Isabel Gal, suggested a link between the use of Primodos and body malformations in newborns.

In 1975 and 1977, the Committee on the Safety of Medicines gave advice to health professionals that Primodos should not be used. However, this was not followed by all prescribers.

“Primodos continued to be used by some to diagnose pregnancy for eight years after the prescription indication was limited to treating women with menstrual disorders,” according to a 2017 report by the Expert Task Force on Hormonal Pregnancy Testing. Primodos was withdrawn from the UK market in 1978.

Marie Lyon, 77, is president of the Association for Children Affected by Hormone Pregnancy Tests (ACDHPT). She took Primodos in the early stages of her first pregnancy with her daughter Sarah and has been fighting for justice ever since.

Sarah was born with one of her arms not fully formed. “I was then advised that these things happen, you know, go and forget about them and get on with life, which I did,” said Marie.

“I asked, like you always do, you know, could it be something I drank? Because I didn’t drink, I didn’t smoke. And all I was told was that sometimes it happens. They don’t have the slightest idea. Why.

“When Sarah was eight, I got a phone call from someone who said, ‘I think you have a daughter with a disability. I was just calling to ask what tablets you took?”

Maria was later told that the tablets her GP gave her contained 40 times more than an oral contraceptive. “I was horrified, angry, relieved, in a way because I thought that meant it had nothing to do with me, I didn’t cause it.”

Marie immediately joined the association in 1978, of which she is now president. The association is made up of a group of parents affected by Primodos. In 1981, they took the drug maker, now part of Bayer Pharma, and the UK government to court.

Last year, Marie Lyon led another class action against Bayer Pharma, Schering Health Care (now part of Bayer), Aventis Pharma and the UK government in a bid to win compensation.

The defendants argued that there was no evidence of a “causal association” between the drugs and the harm suffered by their children.

A Bayer Pharma spokesperson said: “Bayer has always had sympathy for the complainants given the life challenges they have had to face, but Bayer has maintained that there is no causal relationship between the use of Primodos and an incidence increased incidence of congenital anomalies.

“In 2017, the UK Human Medicines Commission’s Expert Working Group published a detailed report concluding that the available scientific data from a variety of scientific disciplines do not support a causal relationship between the use of sex hormones during pregnancy and an increased incidence of congenital abnormalities in the newborn or other adverse effects such as spontaneous abortion, the Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use of the European Medicines Agency supported this conclusion.

“Bayer claims that no significant new scientific knowledge has been produced that calls into question the validity of the previous assessment that there is no link between the use of Primodos and the occurrence of such birth defects. On 26 May 2023, the High Court rejected a UK legal case that specifically claimed that HTPs caused birth defects.

“The judge noted: “This litigation is an attempt to redress the issues that were considered in the previous litigation, which failed because a causal association between HPT and fetal harm could not be established. Having carefully considered the material before me, I conclude that the position has not materially changed in favor of the applicants”. As such, the proceedings were dismissed and the Court determined that there was an abuse of process when the application was brought.

“Earlier UK Primodos litigation against Schering (which is now owned by Bayer) ended in 1982 when the plaintiffs’ legal team, with the court’s approval, decided to drop the litigation on the grounds that it did not the possibility of showing that Primodos caused the alleged congenital anomalies was real.”

The UK government has been contacted for comment.