In the Superior Court of Pennsylvania - How Appealing

claims of these 14 plaintiffs inflicts any actual prejudice on them. In fact, they are
currently defending numerous lawsuits that contain claims indistinguishable from
the claims in this case, both in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas and in
federal and state courts throughout the United States. As noted above, courts
elsewhere have uniformly rejected defendants’ statute of limitations defense on
essentially the same record as the record in these cases. Although statutes of
limitations unquestionably serve important purposes, defendants have failed to
show, and indeed cannot show, that any of those purposes are implicated here.
By contrast, the harmful “real world” consequences of the holding that
defendants ask this Court to reach cannot be ignored. Defendants ask this Court to
hold that every woman who is diagnosed with breast cancer must immediately
begin investigating whether some third–party is or may be responsible for causing
the cancer, even though breast cancer may be caused by a variety of factors for
which no third–party may be responsible. In each of these 14 consolidated cases, a
jury could reasonably find that these plaintiffs had no obligation to investigate
whether their breast cancer was caused by any third–party until the results of the
WHI study had become public. Moreover, a jury could also similarly find that a
reasonable pre–WHI investigation would not have disclosed anything different from
what defendants’ own product labels had disclosed, which would not have notified
these women that defendants’ products caused or may have caused their breast
cancer.
– 41 –