A US man is suing Novartis pharmaceutical company after its Boost Plus health drink allegedly provoked a nasty case of severe priapism.

According to The Evening Standard, 29-year-old Christopher Woods bough the vit-enhanced beverage at a US drugstore on 5 June 2004. Boost Plus is claimed "to help volume-restricted patients get the calories they need", and Woods says that while it did indeed derestrict his volume, this was unfortunately in the trouser department since he woke up the next morning "with an erection that would not subside".

So bad was the unscheduled boner that the New Yorker later that day had to undergo "Winter shunt" surgery and days later a "penile artery embolisation"* to reduce the flow of blood to his manhood.

Woods' lawsuit seeks unspecified damages from Novartis Consumer Health Inc. Novartis spokeswoman Brandi Robinson said the company "was aware of the lawsuit but did not comment on pending litigation". ®

Bootnote

* A Winter shunt, as far as we can make out without coming over a bit wobbly, involves puncturing the glans into one of the penis's rigid corpora cavernosa, releasing trapped blood from the latter back into circulation. The penile artery embolisation is, as the name suggests, a simple matter of restricting the flow of blood to the penis, often with snappily-named "Gelfoam pledgets". We'll leave the docs among you to fill in the gory details, while we go and have a lie down.

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