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What is Stevens-Johnson Syndrome?

Stevens-Johnson syndrome is a life-threatening skin disorder. It starts off with lesions in the mucous membranes of the body including the eyes and the mouth and can ultimately result in blindness, death, and skin detachment. Essentially your skin can fall off your body. This disease has been causally linked by various academic studies, as well as reports that were made directly to the pharmaceutical industry, with single-ingredient ibuprofen products.

This is a disease process that has almost exclusively been associated with drug administration. It's not naturally developing in an individual from an immune disorder; it is due to a drug reaction. And the drugs that have been most implicated are ibuprofen-type products, and one of those products is baby Motrin. It involves not just redness and sloughing off of skin tissue, but it also involves serious debilitating disease processes in a child’s organs.

Stevens-Johnson syndrome can start with symptoms as simple as rash or redness or blisters. Without the consumer knowing that these symptoms are related to Motrin, what happens a lot of times is that parents simply keep on giving more Motrin. Big drug companies like to say they had no obligation to warn of Stevens-Johnson syndrome because it's such a rare risk. Well, what the medical literature shows is that the risk isn't so rare; it can be as high as 5 in every 100,000 people that take the drug. And what that means in a trillion-dollar industry like this, where these manufacturers target to sell tens of thousands or 100,000 bottles of this product every day, is that it could be as high as five kids every day in America are going to get Stevens-Johnson syndrome.

It's so serious that the manufacturer needs to put the public on notice of the consequences of Stevens-Johnson for allergic consumers.

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