THE NATIONAL LAW JOURNAL INTERVIEWS LK CLASS ACTION ATTORNEY JEROME H. BLOCK IN CONNECTION WITH THE RECENTLY FILED TOBACCO CLASS ACTION BROUGHT AGAINST PHILLIP MORRIS USA BY LONG-TIME MARLBORO CIGARETTE SMOKERS FROM NEW YORK.
NEW YORK, New York, November 21, 2006 – In today’s edition of The National Law Journal, Jerome H. Block, a class action attorney and partner at Levy Konigsberg LLP discussed the merits of a potentially pathfinding tobacco lawsuit that the law firm has launched against Phillip Morris USA. The tobacco class action, which seeks medical monitoring for people over the age of fifty, who have smoked at least a pack-a-day of Marlboro cigarettes, has generated a significant amount of attention in the media and in legal circles.
“The sole relief we are seeking is that Phillip Morris pay for a program of CT Scans,” said Block in The National Law Journal article1. A study that was recently published in The New England Journal of Medicine2 provides further confirmation that Low Dose CT Scans of the chest (“LDCT”) constitute an enormously powerful tool to help doctors detect lung cancer in its early stages of development thereby increasing survival rates and saving lives.
Lung cancer causes more than 160,000 deaths each year in the United States. LDCT screening offers hope for millions of Americans who are at increased risk of developing lung cancer from cigarette smoking.
Unfortunately, when employed as an early cancer screening device, LDCT is not usually covered by most medical insurers. Thus, as Block noted in the article, “This is for all those people out there who don’t have this covered and are at increased risk of lung cancer. It’s a huge issue from a public health point of view.”
For more information about the benefits of CT scans for the early detection of lung cancer, go to www.ielcap.org.
1 “Smokers Sue Tobacco Company for Lung Scans” (The National Law Journal, 11/21/2006);
2 “Survival of Patients with Stage I Lung Cancer Detected on CT Screening” (The New England Journal of Medicine, 10/26/2006).
