In response to a 2009 class action lawsuit against Merial, Ltd., over the effectiveness of its popular heartworm preventative, Heartgard Plus [4], Kari Blaho-Owens, Ph.D., claims her employer asked her to destroy a document pertaining to the lawsuit and to stop analysis of data from an internal investigation that she suspected was inaccurate.

In her own lawsuit against Merial, Blaho-Owens says she was fired in July 2010 [5] when she refused to follow the company directives. She served as the "global head of pharmacovigilance" and in the course of her independent research, says she "discovered that Merial had been aware of serious lack of efficacy adverse events reported regarding 'Heartgard Plus' since as early as 2000." Allegedly, the U.S. FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine was questioning whether its FDA-approved label that Heartgard Plus was 100 percent effective should be changed, which could put Merial at a competitive disadvantage.