Man charged in meningitis outbreak that killed 11 in Michigan sentenced
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HOWELL — A pharmaceutical executive who was charged in 2018 with 11 counts of second-degree murder following a nationwide fungal meningitis outbreak has been sentenced to prison again.
Barry Cadden, 57, the former owner of the New England Compounding Center in Framingham, Massachusetts, was sentenced to 10-15 years in prison. He had pleaded no contest to the 11 second-degree murder charges in March.
The 2012 outbreak killed 64 people in the U.S., including 11 that resulted from injections of the steroid methylprednisolone at Michigan Pain Specialists Clinic in Livingston County. The medication, according to Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office, was manufactured at Cadden’s NECC lab and shipped to the Michigan pain clinic.
Donna Kruzich, Paula Brent, Lyn Laperriere, Mary Plettl, Gayle Gipson, Patricia Malafouris, Emma Todd, Jennie Barth, Ruth Madouse, Salley Roe and Karina Baxter died as a result of being injected with the contaminated drug.
Cadden was already serving a federal prison sentence in connection with the outbreak.
“We all depend on safe medications,” Nessel said in a release. “Whether it’s a child needing antibiotics, a parent receiving life-saving treatment, or a grandmother in desperate need of pain relief, every patient deserves to know their medications will help them, not kill them. The families of these 11 victims will forever bear the weight of Mr. Cadden’s greed and disregard for basic standards that caused this horrific tragedy. We can’t bring them back, but with this sentence, I hope the victims' families now have a sense of closure and bad actors know my office will ensure they are held accountable.”
Cadden disregarded sterility procedures in the compounding of sterile medications and ran his business in an egregiously unsafe manner, endorsing laboratory directives that resulted in cleaning records and testing results being forged and fabricated, Nessel said.
The AG’s office began investigating Cadden in 2013. In 2017, he was found guilty in a federal court of 57 criminal charges and was sentenced to 14.5 years in federal prison.
His state sentence will be served concurrently with his federal sentence.
This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: Man charged in meningitis outbreak that killed 11 in Michigan sentenced
