So the House Committee on the Judiciary held a hearing yesterday about a bill aimed at curbing potentially hazardous “confidential settlements” in Federal courts—and the timing couldn’t have been better, given a story that came out earlier this week involving contact lens solution maker, Bausch & Lomb.
Now, it may be understandable in certain contexts to want to keep one’s dirty laundry under wraps, but when it comes to lawsuits that may reveal ongoing public safety hazards (like say, lens solution that infects hundreds of people with a dangerous “eye fungus”), silence is anything but golden. Yet as we’ve been observing for years (here, here, here), companies virtually always demand confidentiality from the injured consumer and his or her attorney—and results can be catastrophic.
With respect to Bausch & Lomb…in recent months, the company has “quietly” settled 600 “eye fungus” lawsuits with lens wearers who were unwittingly exposed to a “potentially blinding infection” known as Fusarium keratitis while using “ReNu with MoistureLoc” lens solution. Seven of those people had to have an eye removed, and another 60 or so needed corneal transplants, and “dozens” more suits are pending.
"All settlements were predicated on silence about the clinical findings and blame and so forth,” said Dr. Arthur Epstein, who was chairman of the American Optometric Association's contact lens and cornea section at the height of the crisis. "The truth has been very carefully buried, and it appears to have been buried going back to the beginnings of the outbreak….My hope was that what actually happened would become part of public record in a courtroom. That way, we'd be able to learn from it and move on and make sure it never happened again."
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