johnson and johnson talcum powder case study

Johnson & Johnson knew for decades that asbestos lurked in its Baby Powder

A reuters investigation.

REUTERS/Mike Wood

JOHNSON&JOHNSON-CANCER/

Facing thousands of lawsuits alleging that its talc caused cancer, J&J insists on the safety and purity of its iconic product. But internal documents examined by Reuters show that the company's powder was sometimes tainted with carcinogenic asbestos and that J&J kept that information from regulators and the public.

By LISA GIRION in Los Angeles

Filed Dec. 14, 2018, 2 p.m. GMT

Darlene Coker knew she was dying. She just wanted to know why.

She knew that her cancer, mesothelioma, arose in the delicate membrane surrounding her lungs and other organs. She knew it was as rare as it was deadly, a signature of exposure to asbestos. And she knew it afflicted mostly men who inhaled asbestos dust in mines and industries such as shipbuilding that used the carcinogen before its risks were understood.

Coker, 52 years old, had raised two daughters and was running a massage school in Lumberton, a small town in eastern Texas. How had she been exposed to asbestos? “She wanted answers,” her daughter Cady Evans said.

Fighting for every breath and in crippling pain, Coker hired Herschel Hobson, a personal-injury lawyer. He homed in on a suspect: the Johnson’s Baby Powder that Coker had used on her infant children and sprinkled on herself all her life. Hobson knew that talc and asbestos often occurred together in the earth, and that mined talc could be contaminated with the carcinogen. Coker sued  Johnson & Johnson, alleging that “poisonous talc” in the company’s beloved product was her killer.

J&J didn’t tell the FDA that at least three tests by three different labs from 1972 to 1975 had found asbestos in its talc – in one case at levels reported as “rather high.”

J&J denied  the claim. Baby Powder was asbestos-free, it said. As the case proceeded, J&J was able to avoid handing over talc test results and other internal company records Hobson had requested to make the case against Baby Powder.

Coker had no choice but to drop her lawsuit, Hobson said. “When you are the plaintiff, you have the burden of proof,” he said. “We didn’t have it.”

That was in 1999. Two decades later, the material Coker and her lawyer sought is emerging as J&J has been compelled to share thousands of pages of company memos, internal reports and other confidential documents with lawyers for some of the 11,700 plaintiffs now claiming that the company’s talc caused their cancers — including thousands of women with ovarian cancer.

A Reuters examination of many of those documents, as well as deposition and trial testimony, shows that from at least 1971 to the early 2000s, the company’s raw talc and finished powders sometimes tested positive for small amounts of asbestos, and that company executives, mine managers, scientists, doctors and lawyers fretted over the problem and how to address it while failing to disclose it to regulators or the public.

The documents also depict successful efforts to influence U.S. regulators’ plans to limit asbestos in cosmetic talc products and scientific research  on the health effects of talc.

A small portion of the documents have been produced at trial and cited in media reports. Many were shielded from public view by court orders that allowed J&J to turn over thousands of documents it designated as confidential. Much of their contents is reported here for the first time.

The earliest mentions of tainted J&J talc that Reuters found come from 1957 and 1958 reports  by a consulting lab. They describe contaminants in talc from J&J’s Italian supplier as fibrous and “acicular,” or needle-like, tremolite. That’s one of the six minerals that in their naturally occurring fibrous form are classified as asbestos.

At various times from then into the early 2000s, reports by scientists at J&J, outside labs and J&J’s supplier yielded similar findings. The reports  identify contaminants in talc and finished powder products as asbestos or describe them in terms typically applied to asbestos, such as “fiberform” and “rods.”

In 1976, as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was weighing limits on asbestos in cosmetic talc products, J&J assured the regulator  that no asbestos was “detected in any sample” of talc produced between December 1972 and October 1973. It didn’t tell the agency that at least three  tests  by three different labs from 1972 to 1975 had found asbestos in its talc – in one case at levels reported as “ rather high .”

Most internal J&J asbestos test reports Reuters reviewed do not find asbestos. However, while J&J’s testing methods improved over time, they have always had limitations that allow trace contaminants to go undetected – and only a tiny fraction  of the company’s talc is tested.

The World Health Organization and other authorities recognize no safe level of exposure to asbestos. While most people exposed never develop cancer, for some, even small amounts of asbestos are enough to trigger the disease years later. Just how small hasn’t been established. Many plaintiffs allege that the amounts they inhaled when they dusted themselves with tainted talcum powder were enough.

The evidence of what J&J knew has surfaced after people who suspected that talc caused their cancers hired lawyers experienced in the decades-long deluge of litigation involving workers exposed to asbestos. Some of the lawyers knew from those earlier cases that talc producers tested for asbestos, and they began demanding J&J’s testing documentation.

What J&J produced in response to those demands has allowed plaintiffs’ lawyers to refine their argument: The culprit wasn’t necessarily talc itself, but also asbestos in the talc. That assertion, backed by decades of solid science showing that asbestos causes mesothelioma and is associated with ovarian and other cancers, has had mixed success in court.

In two cases earlier this year – in New Jersey and California – juries awarded big sums to plaintiffs who, like Coker, blamed asbestos-tainted J&J talc products for their mesothelioma.

A third verdict, in St. Louis, was a watershed, broadening J&J’s potential liability: The 22 plaintiffs were the first to succeed with a claim that asbestos-tainted Baby Powder and Shower to Shower talc, a longtime brand the company sold in 2012, caused ovarian cancer, which is much more common than mesothelioma. The jury awarded them $4.69 billion in damages. Most of the talc cases have been brought by women with ovarian cancer who say they regularly used J&J talc products as a perineal antiperspirant and deodorant.

At the same time, at least three juries have rejected claims that Baby Powder was tainted with asbestos or caused plaintiffs’ mesothelioma. Others have failed to reach verdicts, resulting in mistrials.

J&J has said it will appeal the recent verdicts against it. It has maintained in public statements that its talc is safe, as shown for years by the best tests available, and that the information it has been required to divulge in recent litigation shows the care the company takes to ensure its products are asbestos-free. It has blamed its losses on juror confusion, “junk” science, unfair court rules and overzealous lawyers looking for a fresh pool of asbestos plaintiffs.

"Plaintiffs’ attorneys out for personal financial gain are distorting historical documents and intentionally creating confusion in the courtroom and in the media,” Ernie Knewitz, J&J’s vice president of global media relations, wrote in an emailed response to Reuters’ findings. “This is all a calculated attempt to distract from the fact that thousands of independent tests prove our talc does not contain asbestos or cause cancer. Any suggestion that Johnson & Johnson knew or hid information about the safety of talc is false.”

J&J declined to comment further for this article. For more than two months, it turned down repeated requests for an interview with J&J executives. On Dec. 8, the company offered to make an expert available. It had not done so as of Thursday evening.

The company referred all inquiries to its outside litigation counsel, Peter Bicks. In emailed responses, Bicks rejected Reuters’ findings as “false and misleading.” “The scientific consensus is that the talc used in talc-based body powders does not cause cancer, regardless of what is in that talc,” Bicks wrote. “This is true even if - and it does not - Johnson & Johnson's cosmetic talc had ever contained minute, undetectable amounts of asbestos.” He dismissed tests cited in this article as “outlier” results.

In court, J&J lawyers have told jurors that company records showing that asbestos was detected in its talc referred to talc intended for industrial use. Other records, they have argued, referred to non-asbestos forms of the same minerals that their experts say are harmless. J&J has also argued that some tests picked up “background” asbestos – stray fibers that could have contaminated samples after floating into a mill or lab from a vehicle clutch or fraying insulation.

The company has made some of the same arguments about lab tests conducted by experts hired by plaintiffs. One of those labs found asbestos in Shower to Shower talc from the 1990s, according to an Aug. 11, 2017, court report. Another lab found asbestos in more than half of multiple samples of Baby Powder from past decades – in bottles from plaintiffs’ cupboards and acquired from eBay, and even a 1978 bottle  held in J&J’s corporate museum. The concentrations were great enough that users “would have, more likely than not, been exposed,” the plaintiffs’ lab report presented in several cases this year concluded.

Matthew Sanchez, a geologist with consultants RJ Lee Group Inc and a frequent expert witness for J&J, dismissed those findings in testimony in the St. Louis trial: “I have not found asbestos in any of the current or modern, what I consider modern, Johnson & Johnson talc products,” Sanchez told the jury.

Sanchez did not return calls seeking comment. RJ Lee said it does not comment on the work it does for clients.

Since 2003, talc in Baby Powder sold in the United States has come from China through supplier Imerys Talc America, a unit of Paris-based Imerys SA and a co-defendant in most of the talc litigation. Imerys and J&J said the Chinese talc is safe. An Imerys spokesman said the company’s tests “consistently show no asbestos. Talc’s safe use has been confirmed by multiple regulatory and scientific bodies.”

J&J, based in New Brunswick, New Jersey, has dominated the talc powder market for more than 100 years, its sales outpacing those of all competitors combined, according to Euromonitor International data. And while talc products contributed just $420 million to J&J’s $76.5 billion in revenue last year, Baby Powder is considered an essential facet of the healthcare-products maker’s carefully tended image as a caring company – a “sacred cow,” as one 2003 internal email put it.

“When people really understand what’s going on, I think it increases J&J’s exposure a thousand-fold,” said Mark Lanier, one of the lawyers for the women in the St. Louis case.

The mounting controversy surrounding J&J talc hasn’t shaken investors. The share price is up about 6 percent so far this year. Talc cases make up fewer than 10 percent of all personal injury lawsuits pending against J&J, based on the company’s Aug. 2 quarterly report, in which the company said it believed it had “strong grounds on appeal.”

J&J Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Alex Gorsky has pledged to fight on, telling analysts in July: “We remain confident that our products do not contain asbestos.”

Gorsky’s comment, echoed in countless J&J statements, misses a crucial point. Asbestos, like many environmental carcinogens, has a long latency period. Diagnosis usually comes years after initial exposure – 20 years or longer for mesothelioma. J&J talc products today may be safe, but the talc at issue in thousands of lawsuits was sold and used over the past 60 years.

That point is recognized in a 2013 markup  of a statement for the “Safety & Care Commitment” page of J&J’s website. The original version conveyed a blanket assurance of safety. The edited version was less definitive: “Our talc-based consumer products are   have always been   (we cannot say “always”)  asbestos free, as confirmed by regular testing since the 1970s.”

“Safety first”

In 1886, Robert Wood Johnson enlisted his younger brothers in an eponymous startup built around the “Safety First” motto. Johnson’s Baby Powder grew out of a line of medicated plasters, sticky rubber strips loaded with mustard and other home remedies. When customers complained of skin irritation, the brothers sent packets of talc.

Soon, mothers began applying the talc to infants’ diaper-chafed skin. The Johnsons took note. They added a fragrance that would become one of the most recognizable in the world, sifted the talc into tin boxes and, in 1893, began selling it as Johnson’s Baby Powder.

In the late 1950s, J&J discovered that talc from its chief source mine for the U.S. market in the Italian Alps contained tremolite. That’s one of six minerals – along with chrysotile, actinolite, amosite, anthophyllite and crocidolite – that occur in nature as crystalline fibers known as asbestos, a recognized carcinogen. Some of them, including tremolite, also occur as unremarkable “non-asbestiform” rocks. Both forms often occur together and in talc deposits.

J&J’s worry at the time was that contaminants made the company’s powder abrasive. It sent tons of its Italian talc to a private lab in Columbus, Ohio, to find ways to improve the appearance, feel and purity of the powder by removing as much “grit” as possible. In a pair of reports  from 1957 and 1958, the lab said the talc contained “from less than 1 percent to about 3 percent of contaminants,” described as mostly fibrous and “acicular” tremolite.

Most of the authors of these and other J&J records cited in this article are dead. Sanchez, the RJ Lee geologist whose firm has agreed to provide him as a witness in up to 100 J&J talc trials, has testified that tremolite found decades ago in the company’s talc, from Italy and later Vermont, was not tremolite asbestos at all. Rather, he has said, it was “cleavage fragments” from non-asbestiform tremolite.

J&J’s original records don’t always make that distinction. In terms of health risk, regulators since the early 1970s have treated small fiber-shaped particles of both forms the same.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, for example, “makes no distinction between fibers and (comparable) cleavage fragments,” agency officials wrote  in a response to an RJ Lee report on an unrelated matter in 2006, the year before the firm hired Sanchez. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), though it dropped the non-fibrous forms of the minerals from its definition of asbestos in 1992, nonetheless  recommends  that fiber-shaped fragments indistinguishable from asbestos be counted in its exposure tests.

And as the product safety director for J&J’s talc supplier acknowledged in a 2008 email to colleagues: “(I)f a deposit contains ‘non-asbestiform’ tremolite, there is also asbestiform tremolite naturally present as well.”

“The lungs of babies”

In 1964, J&J’s Windsor Minerals Inc subsidiary bought a cluster of talc mines in Vermont, with names like Argonaut, Rainbow, Frostbite and Black Bear. By 1966, it was blasting and bulldozing white rock out of the Green Mountain state. J&J used the milled powder in its cosmetic powders and sold a less-refined grade to roofing, flooring and tire companies for use in manufacturing.

Ten years after tremolite turned up in the Italian talc, it showed up in Vermont talc, too. In 1967, J&J found traces of tremolite and another mineral that can occur as asbestos, according to a table attached to a Nov. 1, 1967, memo  by William Ashton, the executive in charge of J&J’s talc supply for decades.

J&J continued to search for sources of clean talc. But in an April 9, 1969, memo  to a company doctor, Ashton said it was “normal” to find tremolite in many U.S. talc deposits. He suggested J&J rethink its approach. “Historically, in our Company, Tremolite has been bad,” Ashton wrote. “How bad is Tremolite medically, and how much of it can safely be in a talc base we might develop?”

Since pulmonary disease, including cancer, appeared to be on the rise, “it would seem to be prudent to limit any possible content of Tremolite … to an absolute minimum,” came the reply  from another physician executive days later.

The doctor told Ashton that J&J was receiving safety questions from pediatricians. Even Robert Wood Johnson II, the founder’s son and then-retired CEO, had expressed “concern over the possibility of the adverse effects on the lungs of babies or mothers,” he wrote.

“We have replied,” the doctor wrote, that “we would not regard the usage of our powders as presenting any hazard.” Such assurances would be impossible, he added, “if we do include Tremolite in more than unavoidable trace amounts.”

The memo is the earliest J&J document reviewed by Reuters that discusses tremolite as more than a scratchy nuisance. The doctor urged Ashton to consult with company lawyers because “it is not inconceivable that we could become involved in litigation.”

Never “100% clean”

By the early 1970s, asbestos was widely recognized as the primary cause of mesothelioma among workers involved in producing it and in industries that used it in their products.

Regulation was in the air. In 1972, President Richard Nixon’s newly created OSHA issued its first rule, setting limits on workplace exposure to asbestos dust.

By then, a team at Mount Sinai Medical Center led by pre-eminent asbestos researcher Irving Selikoff had started looking at talcum powders as a possible solution to a puzzle: Why were tests of lung tissue taken post mortem from New Yorkers who never worked with asbestos finding signs of the mineral? Since talc deposits are often laced with asbestos, the scientists reasoned, perhaps talcum powders played a role.

They shared their preliminary findings with New York City’s environmental protection chief, Jerome Kretchmer. On June 29, 1971, Kretchmer informed the Nixon administration and called a press conference to announce that two unidentified brands of cosmetic talc appeared to contain asbestos.

The FDA opened an inquiry. J&J issued a statement : “Our fifty years of research knowledge in this area indicates that there is no asbestos contained in the powder manufactured by Johnson & Johnson.”

Later that year, another Mount Sinai researcher, mineralogist Arthur Langer, told J&J in a letter  that the team had found a “relatively small” amount of chrysotile asbestos in Baby Powder.

Langer, Selikoff and Kretchmer ended up on a J&J list of “antagonistic personalities” in a Nov. 29, 1972, memo , which described Selikoff as the leader of an “attack on talc.”

“I suppose I was antagonistic,” Langer told Reuters. Even so, in a subsequent test of J&J powders in 1976, he didn’t find asbestos – a result that Mount Sinai announced .

Langer said he told J&J lawyers who visited him last year that he stood by all of his findings. J&J has not called him as a witness.

Selikoff died in 1992. Kretchmer said he recently read that a jury had concluded that Baby Powder was contaminated with asbestos. “I said to myself, ‘How come it took so long?’ ” he said.

In July 1971, meanwhile, J&J sent a delegation of scientists to Washington to talk to the FDA officials looking into asbestos in talcum powders. According to an FDA account  of the meeting, J&J shared “evidence that their talc contains less than 1%, if any, asbestos.”

Later that month, Wilson Nashed, one of the J&J scientists who visited the FDA,  said in a memo  to the company’s public relations department that J&J’s talc contained trace amounts of “fibrous minerals (tremolite/actinolite).”

As the FDA continued to investigate asbestos in talc, J&J sent powder samples  to be tested at private and university labs. Though a private lab in Chicago found trace amounts of tremolite, it declared  the amount “insignificant” and the samples “substantially free of asbestiform material.” J&J reported that finding to the FDA under a cover letter that said the “results clearly show” the samples tested “contain no chrysotile asbestos.” J&J’s lawyer told Reuters the tremolite found in the samples was not asbestos.

But J&J’s FDA submission left out University of Minnesota professor Thomas E. Hutchinson’s finding of chrysotile in a Shower to Shower sample – “incontrovertible asbestos,” as he described it in a lab note .

The FDA’s own examinations found no asbestos in J&J powder samples in the 1970s. Those tests, however, did not use the most sensitive detection methods. An early test, for example, was incapable of detecting chrysotile fibers, as an FDA official recognized in a J&J account of an Aug. 11, 1972, meeting with the agency: “I understand that some samples will be passed even though they contain such fibers, but we are willing to live with it.”

By 1973, Tom Shelley, director of J&J’s Central Research Laboratories in New Jersey, was looking into acquiring patents on a process that a British mineralogist and J&J consultant was developing to separate talc from tremolite.

“It is quite possible that eventually tremolite will be prohibited in all talc,” Shelley wrote  on Feb. 20, 1973, to a British colleague. Therefore, he added, the “process may well be valuable property to us.”

At the end of March, Shelley recognized the sensitivity of the plan in a memo  sent to a J&J lawyer in New Jersey: “We will want to carefully consider the … patents re asbestos in talc. It’s quite possible that we may wish to keep the whole thing confidential rather than allow it to be published in patent form and thus let the whole world know.”

J&J did not obtain the patents.

While Shelley was looking into the patents, J&J research director DeWitt Petterson visited the company’s Vermont mining operation. “Occasionally, sub-trace quantities of tremolite or actinolite are identifiable,” he wrote in an April 1973 report  on the visit. “And these might be classified as asbestos fiber.”

J&J should “protect our powder franchise” by eliminating as many tiny fibers that can be inhaled in airborn talc dust as possible, Petterson wrote. He warned, however, that “no final product will ever be made which will be totally free from respirable particles.” Introducing a cornstarch version of Baby Powder, he noted, “is obviously another answer.”

Bicks told Reuters that J&J believes that the tremolite and actinolite Petterson cited were not asbestos.

Cornstarch came up again in a March 5, 1974, report  in which Ashton, the J&J talc supply chief, recommended that the company research that alternative “for defensive reasons” because “the thrust against talc has centered primarily on biological problems alleged to result from the inhalation of talc and related mineral particles.”

“We may have problems”

A few months after Petterson’s recognition that talc purity was a pipe dream, the FDA proposed a rule that talc used in drugs contain no more than 0.1 percent asbestos. While the agency’s cosmetics division was considering similar action on talcum powders, it asked companies to suggest testing methods.

At the time, J&J’s Baby Powder franchise was consuming 20,000 tons of Vermont talc a year.  J&J pressed  the FDA to approve an X-ray scanning technique  that a company scientist said in an April 1973 memo allowed for “an automatic 1% tolerance for asbestos.” That would mean talc with up to 10 times the FDA’s proposed limit for asbestos in drugs could pass muster.

The same scientist confided in an Oct. 23, 1973, note  to a colleague that, depending on what test the FDA adopted for detecting asbestos in cosmetic talc, “we may have problems.”

The best way to detect asbestos in talc was to concentrate the sample and then examine it through microscopes, the Colorado School of Mines Research Institute told J&J in a Dec. 27, 1973, report . In a memo , a J&J lab supervisor said the concentration technique, which the company’s own researchers had earlier used to identify a “tremolite-type” asbestos in Vermont talc, had one limitation: “It may be too sensitive.”

“No mother was going to powder her baby with 1% of a known carcinogen irregardless of the large safety factor.” An FDA official commenting in 1975 on the talc testing method J&J backed 

In his email to Reuters, J&J’s lawyer said the lab supervisor’s concern was that the test would result in “false positives,” showing asbestos where there was none.

J&J also launched research  to find out how much powder a baby was exposed to during a diapering and how much asbestos could be in that powder and remain within OSHA’s new workplace exposure limits . Its researchers had strapped an air sampling device to a doll to take measurements while it was powdered, according to J&J memos and the minutes of a Feb. 19, 1974, meeting of the Cosmetic Toiletry and Fragrance Association (CTFA), an industry group.

“It was calculated that even if talc were pure asbestos the levels of exposure of a baby during a normal powdering are far below the accepted tolerance limits,” the minutes state.

In a Sept. 6, 1974, letter , J&J told the FDA that since “a substantial safety factor can be expected” with talc that contains 1 percent asbestos, “methods capable of determining less than 1% asbestos in talc are not necessary to assure the safety of cosmetic talc.”

Not everyone at the FDA thought that basing a detection method on such a calculation was a good idea. One official called it “foolish,” adding, according to a J&J account  of a February 1975 meeting: “No mother was going to powder her baby with 1% of a known carcinogen irregardless of the large safety factor.”

“Misrepresentation by omission”

Having failed to persuade the FDA that up to 1 percent asbestos contamination was tolerable, J&J began promoting self-policing as an alternative to regulation. The centerpiece of this approach was a March 15, 1976, package of letters from J&J and other manufacturers that the CTFA gave to the agency to show that they had succeeded at eliminating asbestos from cosmetic talc.

“The attached letters demonstrate responsibility of industry in monitoring its talcs,” the cover letter  said. “We are certain that the summary will give you assurance as to the freedom from contamination by asbestos for materials of cosmetic talc products.”

In its letter , J&J said samples of talc produced between December 1972 and October 1973 were tested for asbestos, and none was detected “in any sample.”

J&J didn’t tell the FDA about a 1974 test  by a professor at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire that turned up asbestos in talc from J&J – “fiberform” actinolite, as he put it. Nor did the company tell the FDA about a 1975 report from its longtime lab that found particles identified as “asbestos fibers” in five of 17 samples of talc from the chief source mine for Baby Powder. “Some of them seem rather high,” the private lab wrote in its cover letter .

Bicks, the J&J lawyer, said the contract lab’s results were irrelevant because the talc was intended for industrial use. He said the company now believes that the actinolite the Dartmouth professor found “was not asbestiform,” based on its interpretation of a photo  in the original lab report.

Just two months after the Dartmouth professor reported his findings, Windsor Minerals Research and Development Manager Vernon Zeitz wrote that chrysotile, “fibrous anthophyllite” and other types of asbestos had been “found in association with the Hammondsville ore body” – the Vermont deposit that supplied Baby Powder talc for more than two decades.

Zeitz’s May 1974 report  on efforts to minimize asbestos in Vermont talc “strongly urged” the adoption of ways to protect “against what are currently considered to be materials presenting a severe health hazard and are potentially present in all talc ores in use at this time.”

Bicks said that Zeitz was not reporting on actual test results.

The following year, Zeitz reported  that based on weekly tests of talc samples over six months, “it can be stated with a greater than 99.9% certainty that the ores and materials produced from the ores at all Windsor Mineral locations are free from asbestos or asbestiform minerals.” 

J&J’s selective use of test results figured in a New Jersey judge’s decision this year to affirm the first verdict against the company in a case claiming asbestos in J&J products caused cancer. “Providing the FDA favorable results showing no asbestos and withholding or failing to provide unfavorable results, which show asbestos, is a form of a misrepresentation by omission,” Middlesex County Superior Court Judge Ana Viscomi said in her June ruling .

“J&J respectfully disagrees with the Judge’s comments,” Bicks said. “J&J did not withhold any relevant testing from FDA.”

The FDA declined to comment on the ruling.

Lacking consensus on testing methods, the FDA postponed action to limit asbestos in talc. Years later, it did set limits on asbestos in talc used in drugs. It has never limited asbestos in cosmetic talc or established a preferred method for detecting it.

Instead, in 1976, a CTFA committee chaired by a J&J executive drafted voluntary guidelines , establishing a form of X-ray scanning with a 0.5 percent detection limit as the primary test, the method J&J preferred. The method is not designed to detect the most commonly used type of asbestos, chrysotile, at all. The group said the more sensitive electron microscopy was impractical.

The CTFA, which now does business as the Personal Care Products Council, declined to comment.

X-ray scanning is the primary method  J&J has used for decades. The company also periodically requires the more sensitive checks with electron microscopes. J&J’s lawyer said the company’s tests exceed the trade association standard, and they do. He also said that today, J&J’s X-ray scans can detect suspect minerals at levels as low as 0.1 percent of a sample.

But the company never adopted the Colorado lab’s 1973 recommendation  that samples be concentrated before examination under a microscope. And the talc samples that were subjected to the most sensitive electron microscopy test were a tiny fraction of what was sold. For those and other reasons, J&J couldn’t guarantee its Baby Powder was asbestos-free when plaintiffs used it, according to experts, including some who  testified for plaintiffs.

As early as 1976, Ashton, J&J’s longtime talc overseer, recognized as much in a memo  to colleagues. He wrote that talc in general, if subjected to the most sensitive testing method, using concentrated samples, “will be hard pressed in supporting purity claims.” He described this sort of testing as both “sophisticated” and “disturbing.”

Actress Blair Brown touts Baby Powder in this 1970s-era TV commercial

By 1977, J&J appeared to have tamped down concerns about the safety of talc. An internal August report  on J&J’s “Defense of Talc Safety” campaign noted that independent authorities had deemed cosmetic talc products to be “free of hazard.” It attributed “this growing opinion” to the dissemination to scientific and medical communities in the United States and Britain of “favorable data from the various J&J sponsored studies.”

In 1984, FDA cosmetics chief and former J&J employee Heinz Eiermann reiterated that view. He told the New York Times that the agency’s investigation a decade earlier had prompted the industry to ensure that talc was asbestos-free. “So in subsequent analyses,” he told the paper, “we really could not identify asbestos or only on very rare occasions.”

Two years later, the FDA rejected a citizen request that cosmetic talc carry an asbestos warning label, saying that even if there were trace contamination, the use of talc powder during two years of normal diapering would not increase the risk of cancer.

In 1980, J&J began offering a cornstarch version of Baby Powder – to expand its customer base to people who prefer cornstarch, the company says.

The persistence of the industry’s view that cosmetic talc is asbestos-free is why no studies have been conducted on the incidence of mesothelioma among users of the products. It’s also partly why regulations that protect people in mines, mills, factories and schools from asbestos-laden talc don’t apply to babies and others exposed to cosmetic talc – even though Baby Powder talc has at times come from the same mines as talc sold for industrial use. J&J says cosmetic talc is more thoroughly processed and thus purer than industrial talc.

Until recently, the American Cancer Society (ACS) accepted the industry’s position, saying on its website: “All talcum products used in homes have been asbestos-free since the 1970s.”

After receiving inquiries from Reuters, the ACS in early December revised its website  to remove the assurance that cosmetic talcs are free of asbestos. Now, it says, quoting the industry’s standards, that all cosmetic talc products in the United States “should be free from detectable amounts of asbestos.”

The revised ACS web page  also notes that the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies  talc that contains asbestos as “carcinogenic to humans.”

Despite the success of J&J’s efforts to promote the safety of its talc, the company’s test lab found asbestos fibers in samples taken from the Vermont operation in 1984 , 1985  and 1986 . Bicks said: “The samples that we know of during this time period that contained a fiber or two of asbestos were not cosmetic talc samples.”

Then, in 1992, three years after J&J sold its Vermont mines, the new owner, Cyprus Minerals, said in an internal  report  on “important environmental issues” in its talc reserves that there was “past tremolite” in the Hammondsville deposit. Hammondsville was the primary source of Baby Powder talc from 1966 until its shutdown in 1990.

Bicks rejected the Cyprus report as hearsay, saying there is no original documentation to confirm it. Hammondsville mine records, according to a 1993 J&J memo , “were destroyed by the mine management staff just prior to the J&J divestiture.”

Bicks said the destroyed documents did not include talc testing records.

In 2002 and 2003, Vermont mine operators found chrysotile asbestos fibers on several occasions in talc produced for Baby Powder sold in Canada. In each case, a single fiber was recorded – a  finding  deemed “BDL” – below detection limit. Bicks described the finding as “background asbestos” that did not come from any talc source.

In 2009, the FDA, responding to growing public concern about talc, commissioned tests on 34 samples, including a bottle of J&J Baby Powder and samples of Imerys talc from China. No asbestos was detected.

FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said the agency continues to receive a lot of questions about talc cosmetics. “I recognize the concern,” he told Reuters. He said the agency’s policing of cosmetics in general – fewer than 30 people regulating a “vast” industry – was “a place where we think we can be doing more.”

Gottlieb said the FDA planned to host a public forum in early 2019 to “look at how we would develop standards for evaluating any potential risk.” An agency spokeswoman said that would include examining “scientific test methods for assessment of asbestos.”

“Fishing expedition”

Before law school, Herschel Hobson worked at a rubber plant. There, his job included ensuring that asbestos in talc the workers were exposed to didn’t exceed OSHA limits.

That’s why he zeroed in on Johnson’s Baby Powder after he took on Darlene Coker as a client in 1997. The lawsuit  Coker and her husband, Roy, filed that year against J&J in Jefferson County District Court in Beaumont, Texas, is the earliest Reuters found alleging Baby Powder caused cancer.

Hobson asked J&J for any research it had into the health of its mine workers; talc production records from the mid-1940s through the 1980s; depositions from managers of three labs that tested talc for J&J; and any documents related to testing for fibrous or asbestiform materials.

J&J objected . Hobson’s “fishing expedition” would not turn up any relevant evidence, it asserted in a May 6, 1998, motion. In fact, among the thousands of documents Hobson’s request could have turned up was a letter  J&J lawyers had received only weeks earlier from a Rutgers University geologist confirming that she had found asbestos in the company’s Baby Powder, identified in her 1991 published study as tremolite “asbestos” needles.

Hobson agreed to postpone  his discovery demands until he got the pathology report on Coker’s lung tissue. Before it came in, J&J asked the judge to dismiss  the case, arguing that Coker had “no evidence” Baby Powder caused mesothelioma.

Ten days later, the pathology report  landed: Coker’s lung tissue contained tens of thousands of “long fibers” of four different types of asbestos. The findings were “consistent with exposure to talc containing chrysotile and tremolite contamination,” the report concluded.

“The asbestos fibers found raise a new issue of fact,” Hobson told the judge in a request  for more time to file an opposition to J&J’s dismissal motion. The judge gave him more time but turned down  his request to resume discovery.

Without evidence from J&J and no hope of ever getting any, Hobson advised Coker to drop  the suit.

Hobson is still practicing law in Nederland, Texas. When Reuters told him about the evidence that had emerged in recent litigation, he said: “They knew what the problems were, and they hid it.” J&J’s records would have made a “100% difference” in Coker’s case.

Had the information about asbestos in J&J’s talc come out earlier, he said, “maybe there would have been 20 years less exposure” for other people.

Bicks, the J&J lawyer, said Coker dropped her case because “the discovery established that J&J talc had nothing to do with Plaintiff’s disease, and that asbestos exposure from a commercial or occupational setting was the likely cause.”

Coker never learned why she had mesothelioma. She did beat the odds, though. Most patients die within a year of diagnosis. Coker held on long enough to see her two grandchildren. She died in 2009, 12 years after her diagnosis, at age 63.

Coker’s daughter Crystal Deckard was 5 when her sister, Cady, was born in 1971. Deckard remembers seeing the white bottle of Johnson’s Baby Powder on the changing table where her mother diapered her new sister.

“When Mom was given this death sentence, she was the same age as I am right now,” Deckard said. “I have it in the back of my mind all the time. Could it happen to us? Me? My sister?”

A guiding hand on talc safety research

Johnson & Johnson developed a strategy in the 1970s to deal with a growing volume of research showing that talc miners had elevated rates of lung disease and cancer: Promote the positive, challenge the negative.

That approach was summed up by a J&J applied research director in a “strictly confidential” March 3, 1975, memo to managers of the baby products division, which used the talc in J&J’s signature Baby Powder.

“Our current posture with respect to the sponsorship of talc safety studies has been to initiate studies only as dictated by confrontation,” the memo  said. “This philosophy, so far, has allowed us to neutralize or hold in check data already generated by investigators who question the safety of talc.”

Also, the memo said, “we minimize the risk of possible self-generation of scientific data which may be politically or scientifically embarrassing.”

J&J’s effort to protect its iconic Baby Powder franchise by shaping research was led by physician and scientist executives. An early 1970s study of 1,992 Italian talc miners shows how it worked: J&J commissioned and paid for the study, told the researchers the results it wanted, and hired a ghostwriter to redraft the article that presented the findings in a journal.

The effort entailed other attempts to influence research, including a U.S. government study of the health of talc workers in Vermont. J&J’s Windsor Minerals Inc subsidiary, one of several mine operators involved in the study, developed a relationship with the U.S. National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health researchers to “even influence the conclusions” through suggestions of “subjective interpretations,” according to a 1973 Windsor Minerals memo .

Peter Bicks, outside counsel for J&J, told Reuters in an email that for the Vermont study, company “representatives acted in an ‘educational and advisory capacity’ to provide the researchers with a realistic study plan.”

A 1979 article in the Journal of Environmental Pathology and Toxicology detailing the findings of the study was not good news for talc. It reported a “significant increase” in “respiratory cancer mortality” among miners. A subsequent analysis of the underlying data published in 1988 determined that at least one of the workers died of mesothelioma, the cancer most closely associated with asbestos.

The proposal to study the health of miners of the Italian talc used in Baby Powder for decades came from William Ashton, J&J’s longtime talc supply chief. Ashton had obtained a summary of miners’ medical records compiled by an Italian physician, who also happened to control the country’s talc exports.

J&J should use those records “for maximum benefit,” Ashton said in a May 8, 1973, letter  to Dr Gavin Hildick-Smith, J&J’s director of medical affairs. “It seems to me that the Italian records give us the opportunity to fortify a position on talc safety.”

At the time, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was considering a limit on asbestos in talcs. In an Oct. 18, 1973, memo , Hildick-Smith advised J&J: “The risk/benefit ratio of conducting an epidemiological study in these mines must be considered.”

By early 1974, the study was a go. Hildick-Smith sent money to the Italian talc exporter-physician to hire a team of researchers. Hildick-Smith told the lead researcher in a June 26, 1974, letter  exactly what J&J wanted: data that “would show that the incidence of cancer in these subjects is no different from that of the Italian population or the rural control group.”

That is exactly what J&J got, Hildick-Smith told colleagues a few months later. At a meeting on Sept. 27, 1974, for a “Talc/powder Safety Studies Review,” he reported  the Italian study would dispel the “cancer concern associated with exposure to talc.”

The following spring, Hildick-Smith got a draft of the Italian study from the lead researcher. It needed work to meet the “form and style” requirements of the target journal, he told colleagues in a March 31, 1975, memo . He added that he would send it to a scientific ghostwriter “who will hold it in confidence and rewrite it.”

The article that appeared in 1976 in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine reported results even better than J&J had bargained for. The study found fewer lung cancer deaths than expected, a result that the authors said supported “the thesis of no cancerogenic effect attributable to pure talc.”

It also found no mesothelioma, the signature cancer of asbestos exposure. There is no evidence J&J manipulated or misused the data. Experts for plaintiffs have testified that the Italian study was too small to draw any conclusions about the incidence of such a rare cancer. J&J’s expert witnesses have concluded the opposite.

Bicks noted that the Italian study has been updated three times – in 1979, 2003 and 2017 – “confirming the lack of association between exposure to asbestos-free talc, lung cancer and mesothelioma.”

J&J got a lot of mileage out of the study. It was cited in a review article titled “The Biology of Talc,” published Nov. 1, 1976, in the British Journal of Industrial Medicine. In addition to dozens of published studies, the review cited unpublished research, including one  experiment that used a doll as a proxy for infants and that supported the company’s position on the safety of talc. It didn’t disclose that J&J had commissioned the unpublished research.

The author of the review article concluded that the “concern that has been expressed about the possible health hazard from consumer exposure to cosmetic talc is unwarranted … There is no evidence that its normal use poses a hazard to health.”

The author was Hildick-Smith, the J&J physician executive who had overseen the Italian study and played a key role in the company’s talc safety research. The article did not disclose his J&J connection, identifying him only as a Rutgers University clinical assistant professor. Hildick-Smith died in 2006.

By Lisa Girion

Photo editing: Steve McKinley

Video: Zachary Goelman, Jane Lee, Mike Wood and Krystian Orlinski

Design: Troy Dunkley

Edited by Janet Roberts and John Blanton

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Johnson and Johnson’s Toxic Talc: A Timeline Toward Victory

At a glance.

On August 11, 2022, Johnson & Johnson announced they will stop the global sale of talc-based baby powder and finally transition to a safer corn-starch based formula for all its customers by 2023.

This victory is a long time coming and is the result of a global-wide movement of health and justice organizations, government agencies, investigative journalists and concerned people who took action to hold Johnson & Johnson (J&J) accountable for the sale of asbestos-contaminated talcum powder and its links to ovarian cancer and mesothelioma.

The following timeline is a snapshot of this tragedy and of the path toward victory. 

Download as PDF Flyer

Background on Talc Asbestos Contamination

Talc can become contaminated by asbestos during the mining process because naturally occurring veins of asbestos can run through talc deposits. Johnson & Johnson KNEW since the late 1950s that the talc used in its iconic baby powder was sometimes contaminated with asbestos, known to cause ovarian cancer and mesothelioma. For decades, J&J kept this contamination a secret from the public and regulators. In May of 2020, J&J announced it would stop selling its talc-based baby powder in the United States & Canada (although sell-downs of remaining product continued). This announcement was followed shortly with public statements from J&J acknowledging the leadership of Black Lives Matter and committing to racial equity in response to the unjust police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and hundreds of other Black men and women. These statements proved to be superficial and hollow: for two more years, the healthcare giant belittled health, and racist targeting & marketing concerns from the global community, and refused to initiate a worldwide ban on its toxic talc, choosing instead to expose Black and Brown communities around the world to this hazardous product. Until now.

Timeline of Johnson & Johnson Stop Selling Toxic Talc Campaign

FEBRUARY 2020: Ahmaud Arbery is stalked and murdered while jogging in Satilla Shores, Georgia

MARCH 2020: J&J faces over 20,000 lawsuits related to its talc-based baby powder and links to cancer

Breonna Taylor is shot and killed in her apartment by police officers in Louisville, Kentucky

APRIL 2020: Media exposé reveals that J&J ramped up marketing to “African American” and “overweight women” knowing the asbestos-related health concerns linked to use of their baby powder as U.S. sales dropped

One specific J&J memo suggests investigating “ethnic (African American/Hispanic) opportunities in order to grow the franchise,” while also referring to “negative publicity from the health community on talc,” including “inhalation, dust, negative doctor endorsement, cancer linkage.”

MAY 2020: J&J announces it will stop selling its talc-based baby powder in the United States & Canada

J&J continues to sell-down its remaining inventory in stores in the US and Canada, and refuses to stop selling its talc-based baby powder throughout the rest of the world.

George Floyd is murdered on the sidewalk by a police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota

JUNE 2020: J&J issues a formal statement “in solidarity with Black Lives Matter”

The statement is released to J&J employees and its global customers in response to the protests spurred by the violent deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery “affirming (the) company’s commitment to justice and equality” and “unequivocally stating that racism in any form is unacceptable, and that black lives matter.”

India officials questions why J&J’s baby powder isn’t banned in India

Noting J&J’s announcement to withdraw its baby powder from North America “is aimed at safeguarding the health and human rights of residents and citizens of North America but not the residents and citizens of India.”

Black Women for Wellness (BWW) organizes leading U.S. health and justice organizations, and advocacy groups to call-out J&J’s racist double standards and harmful practices related to the sale of its talc-based baby powder

Outraged by J&J’s hypocrisy and its superficial commitment to racial equity, the groups launch a powerful campaign, demanding the multinational giant end its racist double standard of protecting North Americans from – while exposing women of color around the world to – its toxic talc.

JULY 2020 : BWW sends a letter to J&J, signed by 170+ NGOs from around the world, urging the corporation to commit to stop selling their talc-based powder globally

The groups also urge a voluntarily recall – and safely dispose of – any existing inventory to protect people from the potential, serious adverse health effects presented by asbestos contaminated talc ranging from ovarian cancer to mesothelioma. 

J&J responds 3 days later with a dismissive, condescending email that ignores the important issues raised by BWW’s letter.

AUGUST 2020 : BWW sends a second letter to J&J, this time signed by over 200 orgs from 51 countries around the world demanding J&J stop global sales of its toxic talc.

BWW concurrently launches a global week of action to draw worldwide attention to J&J’s misconduct. NGO partners join in from all over the world raising public awareness and generate global media coverage.

NOVEMBER 2020: Congo-Brazzaville: Gov’t suspends the importation and sale of J&J’s talc-based baby powder

JUNE 2021: J&J is ordered to pay $2.2 billion to 22 women who got ovarian cancer after using its talc-based products

The Missouri court states the company’s decision not to warn people when it knew its baby powder could be contaminated with asbestos was driven by “evil motive or reckless indifference.”

JULY 2021: NGO, the National Council of Negro Women, files a lawsuit against J&J

The group accused the company of “knowingly deceptive marketing to Black women” for decades — with free samples at beauty salons, radio campaigns and other efforts — despite internal concerns that the product might be harmful.

OCTOBER 2021: J&J files for bankruptcy and creates a subsidiary to hold all of the liabilities associated with the 40K lawsuits filed against them

This legal maneuver is referred to as a “Texas Two-Step” and is used by companies to circumvent jury trials involving allegations of misconduct and avoid financial liability for court-issued judgments against them.

MARCH 2022: Court documents reveal J&J’s 1970s testing of talc predominantly on Black people while incarcerated

Previously unsealed, trial documents show the company funded experiments mainly on Black men comparing the effects of talc and asbestos on their skin. In one study, inmates were injected with potentially cancer-causing asbestos so J&J could compare its effect on their skin versus that of talc. 

APRIL 2022: HBO Max documentary NOT SO PRETTY spotlights J&J’s toxic talc

J&J shareholders vote in favor of company-wide racial audit

In a resolution introduced by Mercy Investment Services addressing on-going concerns about J&J’s history of racist targeting, shareholders vote overwhelmingly in support of requiring the company to partake in a third-party racial audit. 

J&J prevents shareholders from seeing video testimony on health concerns linked to use of the company’s talc-powder

Produced by NGO Tulipshare , J&J bans video testimony from health-impacted people and concerned scientists, justice-leaders and legislators from shareholder meeting where a vote to stop sales of baby powder is on the agenda. 

AUGUST 2022: VICTORY! Johnson & Johnson announces it will discontinue talc-based baby powder globally in 2023

While the company continues to deny any wrong-doing and defends the safety of their product, Johnson and Johnson announces it will start using cornstarch, not talc, in all the baby powder it sells around the world. 

Today, Johnson and Johnson faces over 40,000 lawsuits and trillions of dollars in civil penalty claims and settlements

Companies like Johnson & Johnson have long created, manipulated, and capitalized off cultural norms, actively targeting Black and Brown women without disclosing the potential risks associated with use of this product, even as internal J&J documents reference concerns linked to carcinogenic effects of its talc-based powders. This is an important victory, but also one filled with decades of tragedy, and outrageous actions and practices from an industry that continues to put profit and bottom-line over the health and safety of people. 

To learn more about the campaign, references, the history, and how you can get involved in action campaigns to hold corporations accountable visit: https://bwwla.org/johnson-johnson/

U.S. Organizing Committee

Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments, Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization, Black Women for Wellness, Breast Cancer Prevention Partners, Campaign for Healthier Solutions, Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, Clean Water Action, Coming Clean, Until Justice Data Partners, Materials Research, Mind the Store Campaign, National Women’s Health Network, Sierra Club Gender, Equity & Environment Program, U.S. Public Interest Research Group, WE ACT for Environmental Justice, Women’s Voices for the Earth

Get the Timeline as a PDF Flyer  

Download, screenshot, or print your version of the victory timeline, thanks to our partners at Women’s Voices for the Earth . 

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Topics: Cosmetics Environmental Justice Equity Lawsuits Personal Care Products

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Related Resources

VICTORY: Johnson & Johnson to Discontinue Talc-Based Baby Powder Globally

Johnson & Johnson Talc-Based Baby Powder: Asbestos-Cancer Concerns and the Global NGO Response

Bcpp joins 183 ngos from 51 countries to demand johnson & johnson halt global sales of popular talc-based baby powder, big win for public health: johnson & johnson to stop selling iconic baby powder in the u.s. & canada due to asbestos contamination, but more needed, you have successfully subscribed.

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Knowledge at Wharton Podcast

Talcum trouble: where does j&j’s responsibility lie, may 11, 2016 • 25 min listen.

Johnson & Johnson has been accused of ignoring warnings linking its talcum powder to ovarian cancer and failing to inform users of that potential risk. Is it a case of prioritizing profits over safety?

• Public Policy

Adetunji T. Toriola and Robert Field on the J&J Baby Powder Case

Johnson & Johnson is battling claims that it has prioritized revenues over ethics after a recent court case awarded damages to a woman who was diagnosed with cancer following years of using its talcum powder. Although this was the third such case, the company maintains that the medical evidence of the links between ovarian cancer and talc is uncertain. However, despite scientific facts, its brand image could take some knocks, say experts at Wharton and Washington University.

The links between ovarian cancer and talcum powder are not clear, according to Adetunji T. Toriola , assistant professor in the division of public health sciences at Washington University School of Medicine and a molecular cancer epidemiologist at its Siteman Cancer Center. “Some studies have found increased ovarian cancer with increased use of talcum powder in the genital areas, while others have not,” he said.

Toriola noted that the Lyon, France-based International Agency for Research on Cancer had in 2006 classified the use of talc-based body powder as “possibly carcinogenic to humans.” According to him, that means “there is not sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity in humans,” although the agency found sufficient evidence of that link in experiments with animals. “We need more data from prospective studies that follow women over time,” he said.

Could a case be made that J&J ignored the information or warnings from some of those studies? “It looks like they did. But there is no smoking gun at this point,” said Robert Field , Wharton lecturer in health care management and Drexel University law and health management professor. “[J&J] didn’t do what the asbestos companies did or the tobacco companies did, which was to actively suppress it. In those cases, you had billions and billions of dollars [awarded] in judgments.”

Toriola and Field discussed the ethical and business issues involved in the J&J case on the Knowledge at Wharton show on Wharton Business Radio on SiriusXM channel 111 . (Listen to the podcast at the top of this page.)

Talc Damages: A Brief Account

The latest case is the third J&J has faced over its talcum powder product. On May 2, a judicial circuit court for the City of St. Louis in Missouri awarded $55 million in damages to Gloria Ristesund of South Dakota, who had used J&J’s talc-based feminine hygiene products for nearly 40 years and was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2011. Her cancer is now in remission. The award includes $50 million in punitive damages, which are imposed when courts want to punish a defendant over and above simple compensation ($5 million in this case). J&J faces more than a thousand such lawsuits in courts, and has been accused of ignoring warnings linking its talcum powder to ovarian cancer and failing to inform users of that potential risk.

“There is no smoking gun at this point.” –Robert Field

Earlier this year, the same St. Louis court had awarded $72 million in damages to the family of another woman who had used the product and died of ovarian cancer. Three years ago, a South Dakota court had found the company to be negligent in not warning Deane Berg, the petitioner, of the risks associated with its baby talcum powder that she had used for 30 years, but it did not award any damages.

J&J will appeal the latest verdict, according to a company statement . “Multiple scientific and regulatory reviews have determined that talc is safe for use in cosmetic products and the labeling on Johnson’s Baby Powder is appropriate,” it said.

Uncertain Links, but a Damning Judgment

According to reports , J&J was aware of medical concerns over talcum use in the 1990s, but the firm ramped up promotion of its baby powder to African American and Hispanic consumers, who are heavy users of its product.

“One thing that looks very bad for J&J is that the indications from the data … that the risks are particularly heightened among African American and Hispanic women … and J&J promoted that use among this population,” Field said. “It certainly looks like they were singling out a minority group.”

According to Field, that link between J&J’s talcum powder and African American/Hispanic women has been damaging for the company. “[The company’s actions here were] not just negligent but almost intentional,” he said. “They were completely rough riding and ignoring the evidence because they saw a potentially lucrative market. It looked bad to the jury, and that is one of the reasons they tagged on these huge, punitive damages.”

But the medical evidence there is slim, according to Toriola. He said one of the risk factors for ovarian cancer is reproductive history and the use of birth control. “It is likely and possible that women of African American descent have a different reproductive history compared to Caucasian women,” he said. But he also noted that those with a family history of ovarian and breast cancer have a higher risk. “All that needs to be considered as well in this case.”

‘Drawing a Line in the Sand’

“I don’t think the issue in this case has to do with placing revenue objectives over ethical behavior,” said Wharton management professor John Kimberly . “It has more to do with the company drawing a line in the sand, in the belief that ultimately their approach to assuring product safety will be validated.”

“It has more to do with [J&J] drawing a line in the sand, in the belief that ultimately their approach to assuring product safety will be validated.” –John Kimberly

According to Kimberly, J&J must have “carefully considered the reputational risks” as it decided how to proceed with the latest case. “J&J, like any other company, and particularly any consumer products company, always has to be mindful of its reputation among consumers,” he said. “They clearly have opted for an aggressive defense of their approach to product safety in this case.”

Impact on Brand Image

J&J’s baby powder was one of its earliest products and was launched in 1894, six years after the company was founded in New Brunswick, New Jersey. “In that sense, it reflects the essence and core of the brand heritage,” said Wharton marketing professor Patti Williams . “And of course, it is closely associated with the baby-focused business, where the credo itself is very important to consumers.”

J&J earned a reputation for living by its credo of putting consumers before profits in its handling of the Tylenol case in 1982 , when bottles of the drug were found to contain traces of cyanide, resulting in seven deaths. The company spent more than $100 million in a nationwide recall of Tylenol, replacing bottles with new tamper-proof packaging.

That credo is “in J&J’s blood…. There is a real sense of what the credo means,” Wharton professor of legal studies and business ethics Thomas Donaldson told Knowledge at Wharton in a 2012 story . Around that time, the company faced a string of quality issues, including recalls of its Children’s Tylenol, Benadryl and hip-replacement devices, and a case involving its anti-psychotic drug Risperdal, where it agreed to pay a $158 million settlement.

According to Williams, J&J faces “a lot of risks” on the trust aspect in the fallout of the latest case. “Trust is crucial to a brand that has been built on its care and concern for babies,” she said. “To some extent the sense that the brand can be trusted to care for children is central to the essence of the J&J brand overall.”

“To the extent that consumers perceive this as the latest in a series of ways in which J&J hasn’t lived up to its credo, this could certainly be problematic for the brand.” –Patti Williams

Williams said it is not clear to what extent consumer perceptions of the J&J corporate brand — versus the individual product brands — still reflect the quality issues the company faced in earlier years. “However, I think that the centrality of [baby powder] to the J&J brand position is problematic,” she added. “To the extent that consumers perceive this as the latest in a series of ways in which J&J hasn’t lived up to its credo, this could certainly be problematic for the brand.”

Issues to Pursue

The case has brought into focus other issues that also merit attention, according to Toriola. He noted that the studies conducted thus far suggest a link to only one type of ovarian cancer, although that is the most common type. Also, only continued, long-term use of the talc could expose a person to those risks, as opposed to infrequent use, he added.

Toriola called for “a bigger investigation” into the suspected links between talcum powder use and ovarian cancer. “The most definitive evidence will come from a trial, but it is not ethical to conduct a trial,” he said. “The next step is a bigger study that just follows people over time who have used this product and compare it with others who have not used it. That is where you will find the ultimate evidence.”

Meanwhile, law firms have been actively pitching for business, promising to extract compensation for other users of the talcum powder. “The lawyers are all over the potential links between the use of the company’s talcum powder and the onset of ovarian cancer, sensing a potential gold mine,” noted Kimberly.

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Watch CBS News

Johnson & Johnson reaches $700 million settlement in talc baby powder case

By Khristopher J. Brooks

Edited By Anne Marie Lee

Updated on: June 11, 2024 / 6:53 PM EDT / CBS News

Johnson & Johnson has agreed to pay $700 million in a nationwide settlement resolving allegations that it misled customers about the safety of its talcum-based powder products in its marketing. 

"Consumers rely on accurate information when making decisions about which products to purchase for their families," Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul, one of 43 attorneys general involved in the lawsuit,  said  in a statement Tuesday. "Any company — no matter how large — must be held accountable when laws protecting consumers are broken and their trust is violated."

As part of the  settlement , which is still pending judicial approval, the health products giant will permanently stop the manufacturing, promotion and sale of all of its baby powder and other body and cosmetic products that contain talcum powder. That includes Johnson's Baby Powder and Johnson & Johnson's Shower to Shower. The company decided to  pull talc-based powders off the market  in North America  in 2020 . 

J&J will make four settlement payments, starting at the end of July, to 42 states and Washington, D.C., according to the settlement. 

In a statement, J&J's worldwide vice president of litigation, Erik Hass, said the company "continues to pursue several paths to achieve a comprehensive and final resolution of the talc litigation. That progress includes the finalization of a previously announced agreement that the Company reached with a consortium of 43 State Attorneys Generals to resolve their talc claims. We will continue to address the claims of those who do not want to participate in our contemplated consensual bankruptcy resolution through litigation or settlement."

The $700 million settlement is the latest development in decade-long legal battles and investigations into links between cancer and the talc used in one of its best-known products. More than 50,000 claims have been filed against the company, mostly on behalf of women who developed ovarian cancer. 

Earlier this month, a jury in Oregon  awarded $260 million  to a local woman who claimed that the company's baby powder products were "directly responsible" for her  cancer diagnosis in 2003. In April, a jury awarded $45 million to the family of an Illinois woman who died in 2020 from mesothelioma after being exposed to asbestos in J&J powder. 

Last month, J&J offered to pay $6.5 billion  to settle the talc-powder lawsuits. 

• Johnson & Johnson
• Class-Action Lawsuit

Khristopher J. Brooks is a reporter for CBS MoneyWatch. He previously worked as a reporter for the Omaha World-Herald, Newsday and the Florida Times-Union. His reporting primarily focuses on the U.S. housing market, the business of sports and bankruptcy.

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Here's how much each state will receive from the $700 million Johnson & Johnson settlement

Dozens of U.S. states, including Texas, North Carolina and Florida, are expected to receive money by the end of July from the recent $700 million settlement with Johnson & Johnson over its talc-based body and baby powder safety claims.

Texas, which will receive over $61.5 million as part of the settlement, helped lead the multistate litigation against the pharmaceutical giant claiming the talc ingredients in its products caused mesothelioma, ovarian cancer and other serious health issues. Each state will be paid out in four installments over four years, beginning July 30.

“We have reached a landmark settlement with Johnson & Johnson ensuring that the company will abide by the law and take effective steps to protect consumers from potentially hazardous ingredients,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said Tuesday in a statement . “I’m proud to lead this coalition of 43 attorneys general to stand up for consumers’ health and truth in marketing.”

Paxton was joined by 42 other attorney generals from around the U.S. in the legal effort.

“Consistent with the plan we outlined last year, the company continues to pursue several paths to achieve a comprehensive and final resolution of the talc litigation," Erik Haas, worldwide vice president of litigation for Johnson & Johnson, said in a statement emailed to USA TODAY on Wednesday.

"That progress includes the finalization of a previously announced agreement that the company reached with a consortium of 43 State Attorneys Generals to resolve their talc claims. We will continue to address the claims of those who do not want to participate in our contemplated consensual bankruptcy resolution through litigation or settlement.”

How much will each US state receive from the $700 million settlement?

Here is how much each U.S. state will receive from the $700 million settlement, pending court approval. Johnson & Johnson will pay $175 million per year over the four years, according to court records.

• Alabama: $13.4 million
• Alaska: $3.15 million
• Arizona : $15.4 million
• Arkansas : $12.7 million
• California: $78 million
• Colorado : $14.3 million
• Connecticut : $9.2 million
• Delaware : $4.9 million
• Washington, DC (District of Columbia): $3 million
• Florida : $48 million
• Georgia: $24.1 million
• Hawaii: $5.3 million
• Idaho: $5.7 million
• Illinois : $29 million
• Indiana : $18 million
• Iowa : $9.4 million
• Kansas: $11.4 million
• Kentucky : $9 million
• Maine : $4.8 million
• Maryland: $14.9 million
• Massachusetts : $14.5 million
• Michigan : $20.6 million
• Minnesota : $10.5 million
• Montana: $3.5 million
• Nebraska : $5.2 million
• Nevada: $6.1 million
• New Hampshire : $5.9 million
• New Jersey : $30.2 million
• New York : $44 million
• North Carolina: $27.3 million
• North Dakota: $3.2 million
• Ohio : $27.7 million
• Oklahoma : $9.8 million
• Oregon : $15 million ($4.7 million of which will "directly support women’s health")
• Rhode Island : $6.9 million
• South Dakota: $3.6 million
• Texas: $61.5 million
• Utah: $7.5 million
• Vermont : $3.1 million
• Virginia : $21.1 million
• Washington state: $13.9 million
• West Virginia : $5.9 million
• Wisconsin: $15.8 million

Contributing: Bayliss Wagner/ Austin American-Statesman and Minnah Arshad/ USA TODAY

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Johnson & Johnson Adds $1.1B to Proposed Talc Settlement

Johnson & Johnson plans to pay an additional $1.1 billion to resolve tens of thousands of legal actions alleging its baby powder and other talc products caused cancer, two people familiar with the matter said.

The increase would boost the size of the settlement to more than $9 billion paid over 25 years. J&J on Wednesday said it reached an agreement with a plaintiffs’ lawyer representing 12,000 clients to recommend the settlement offer to them, adding to support already received from other claimants.

Related: J &J in Talks with Holdouts to $6.5 Billion Talc Settlement

The healthcare giant is preparing to have a subsidiary declare bankruptcy to finalize the proposed settlement before the end of this month, one of the people said. J&J would continue operating without filing for Chapter 11. The company maintains its talc products are safe and do not cause cancer.

The timing of a bankruptcy filing could change depending on how the counting of additional votes unfolds.

Related: J&J Eyes Texas as Venue for Next Round of Baby Powder Fight

J&J said Allen Smith, the plaintiffs’ lawyer now supporting its plan, agreed to the settlement offer in exchange for “additional monetary and non-monetary benefits for all talc claimants” in a bankruptcy plan it expects a judge to later approve.

J&J declined to comment on the amount of additional money it plans to pay and did not respond to an inquiry regarding the timetable for a subsidiary filing for bankruptcy protection.

Related: J&J Gets Plaintiff Backing for $6.5 Billion Baby Powder Accord

The company earlier this summer gave talc claimants until July 26 to vote on its proposed bankruptcy settlement. In August, J&J allowed claimants additional time at the request of plaintiffs’ lawyers including Smith, the company said.

J&J’s current settlement offer is “the best and most realistic option available for claimants to recover for their claims in a timely manner,” Smith said in a J&J news release Wednesday.

With votes from Smith’s clients, J&J expects to garner support from more than 75% of claimants alleging the company’s talc sickened them. Support from 75% of claimants is the legally required threshold for a judge to approve the kind of bankruptcy settlement J&J has proposed. The additional votes will put J&J “well above” that bar, the company said.

J&J faces talc lawsuits from more than 62,000 plaintiffs, according to a company filing. But the figure swells as high as 100,000 when counting claimants who haven’t sued, Erik Haas, J&J’s global vice president of litigation, has said.

Some lawyers representing cancer victims oppose J&J’s plan to resolve the litigation and are locked in a bitter battle with the company.

J&J has previously described its settlement offer as having a net present value of about $6.48 billion with the amount of actual cash paid over 25 years totaling $8 billion. The increased payout J&J is planning raises the latter figure above $9 billion.

After being rebuffed twice by federal courts, J&J is attempting again to end the talc litigation in a so-called “Texas two-step” bankruptcy.

The two-step maneuver involves offloading its talc liability onto a newly created subsidiary, which then declares Chapter 11. The goal is to use the proceeding to force all claimants into one settlement without requiring J&J to file bankruptcy itself.

J&J’s latest settlement offer addresses allegations talc caused ovarian and other gynecological cancers, which are the bulk of the claims J&J faces.

It excludes other claims, including those from plaintiffs alleging asbestos-laced talc caused their mesothelioma, a deadly cancer that attacks a thin layer of tissue that covers many internal organs. J&J says its talc does not contain asbestos.

(Reporting by Spector and Knauth in New York and Roy in Bengaluru; Editing by Shinjini Ganguli, Bill Berkrot and Marguerita Choy)

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Johnson & Johnson, 43 attorneys general reach $700M settlement over talc baby powder

D.c. plus 42 states, including maryland and virginia, found that asbestos was present in the talc and that the company failed to disclose this could lead to cancer, by susan hogan, news4 consumer investigative reporter and maggie more • published june 11, 2024 • updated on june 13, 2024 at 2:27 pm.

Johnson & Johnson will pay $700 million to settle a major lawsuit over its talc baby powder.

The settlement approved and filed in court on Tuesday comes after more than 40 state attorneys general sued the company, claiming it misled customers about product safety.

📺 Watch News4 now: Stream NBC4 newscasts for free right here, right now.

Johnson & Johnson had been under investigation over the marketing of its talcum-based baby powder, which the company sold for over 100 years.

D.C. plus 42 states, including Maryland and Virginia, found that asbestos was present in the talc and that the company failed to disclose this could lead to cancer.

Thousands of women in the U.S. have applied talc baby powder to the genitals or in their underwear to absorb moisture and prevent odor that is heavily socially stigmatized, often in advertising . Studies of talc powder have shown that use of the powder in this manner is linked to ovarian cancer.

The association between talc and ovarian cancer is greater for people who used the powder frequently or for long periods of time, NBC News reported in May .

Under the agreement, Johnson & Johnson will permanently stop manufacturing, marketing and selling all baby, body and cosmetic powder products containing talcum powder.

Here's how the DMV's share of the $700 million dollars in the settlement will be distributed:

• D.C. will receive $3 million
• Virginia will receive $21.1 million
• Maryland will receive $14.9 million

None of the three attorney general offices responded to questions from News4 about whether any consumers will receive restitution, or how the money will be disbursed.

Johnson & Johnson to settle talc baby powder investigation, will reportedly pay $700 million

Johnson & Johnson effort to resolve talc cancer lawsuits in bankruptcy fails a second time

Supreme Court Rejects Johnson & Johnson's Appeal of $2 Billion Penalty in Baby Powder Cancer Case

While the lawsuit settled on Tuesday targeted allegations of deceptive marketing of the talc products, there are still tens of thousands of lawsuits filed by private individuals that claim Johnson & Johnson talc-based products caused serious health issues, including mesothelioma and ovarian cancer.

Some of those lawsuits are slated to go to trial this year.

Johnson & Johnson finished the first quarter of the financial year with higher-than-expected earnings per share, as sales in its medical devices business surged. Its total revenue, at $21.38 billion, was on par with the expected $21.4 billion estimate. That revenue is up more than 2% from the same quarter in 2023, CNBC reported .

In a statement, the company told News4 in part that "... the Company continues to pursue several paths to achieve a comprehensive and final resolution of the talc litigation ..."

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Court rules against johnson & johnson in talcum powder cancer study case.

A New Jersey federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit brought by a Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ ) subsidiary against Dr. Jacqueline Moline, who published a paper linking talc-based consumer products to cancer .

The court found that Moline’s research was neither fraudulent nor libelous, reaffirming her free speech rights under the First Amendment.

U.S. District Judge Georgette Castner ruled that Moline did not engage in fraud, libel, or false advertising when she published a 2020 paper concluding that exposure to asbestos-contaminated talcum powder products can cause mesothelioma.

Also Read: Judge Blocks Cancer Victims’ Attempt To Stop Johnson & Johnson Bankruptcy Plan .

The lawsuit, filed by Johnson & Johnson’s subsidiary LTL Management, failed to prove that the research was “verifiably false,” Reuters noted, citing Judge Castner.

The company created LTL Management to shield itself from numerous talc lawsuits. Last year, it sued four researchers for allegedly fraudulent scientific studies. The lawsuit against the other three researchers is still pending .

Johnson & Johnson faces over 61,000 lawsuits from plaintiffs alleging its talc caused ovarian cancer or mesothelioma. With a mixed record in litigation, the company seeks support for a $6.48 billion settlement proposal to end the lawsuits.

This offer, however, has divided plaintiffs’ lawyers. Many opponents argue against using LTL Management’s bankruptcy to end current and future lawsuits, preferring trials over a forced settlement.

Johnson & Johnson’s previous two attempts at a bankruptcy settlement were unsuccessful.

The company accused Moline of profiting as a paid expert in asbestos cases, noting her involvement in over 200 cosmetic talc cases and her testimony in 16 trials.

Nonetheless, Castner found that Moline had transparently disclosed her role as a litigation expert and the origins of her study data from medical records and depositions.

Moline even issued a correction post-publication to note that one individual in her study was exposed to asbestos from contaminated cigarette filters.

Johnson & Johnson’s Drug Seltorexant Aces Late-Stage Depression Trial .

Price Action: JNJ shares are up 0.31% at $146.91 at the last check on Tuesday.

Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

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This article Court Rules Against Johnson & Johnson In Talcum Powder Cancer Study Case originally appeared on Benzinga.com

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Over $1Billion added to J&J Talc Settlement Proposal

Johnson & Johnson is adding $1.1 billion to the $9 billion+ proposed settlement to resolve claims that J&J baby powder caused ovarian and other gynecological cancers, and it’s causing a rift amongst plaintiffs’ lawyers.

New J&J Deal

• The ovarian claims to be resolved by the Plan constitute 99.75% of the pending talc lawsuits against the Company and its affiliates in the United States.
• The remaining pending personal injury lawsuits relate to mesothelioma and will be addressed outside of the Plan. The Company already has resolved 95% of mesothelioma lawsuits filed to date.
• The State consumer protection claims will also be addressed outside the Plan; the Company already has agreements in principle to do so.
• Finally, and for completeness, the Company has also reached an agreement in principle to resolve all talc-related claims against it in the bankruptcy cases filed by suppliers of its talc (Imerys Talc America, Inc., Cyprus Mines Corporation, and their related parties. In mid-July, J&J proposed a $505 million settlement by December 31, 2025, to be paid to bankrupt talc miners Imerys Talc America and Cyprus Mines Corporation to resolve disputes over talc liabilities).

READ MORE TALCUM POWDER LEGAL NEWS

• J&J Offers $6.48 Billion to Settle Ovarian Cancer Talcum Powder Lawsuits
• Johnson & Johnson Strikes Back
• Last Dance, Last Chance for the Texas Two-Step in J&J Talc Litigation

Talcum Powder Legal Help

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Johnson & Johnson Case: Can Talcum Powder Really Cause Cancer?

Johnson & Johnson lost a second lawsuit Tuesday when a Missouri jury ordered the company to pay $55 million to a woman who said the company's talcum-powder products caused her ovarian cancer.

The company says it will appeal the decision — and claims the science backs it up. J&J is fighting about 1,200 lawsuits that allege the company knew about cancer risks but did not warn consumers. It lost the first lawsuit in February.

Here are some answers to questions about talc and cancer:

Can talc c ause cancer?

Maybe — but there’s not very much evidence to show that. According to the American Cancer Society , some talc in its natural form contains asbestos, which is known to cause cancers in and around the lungs when inhaled. “All talcum products used in homes in the United States have been asbestos-free since the 1970s,” the American Cancer Society says on its website. The Food and Drug Administration says it has looked into this and hasn't found any asbestos in the products it checked.

“The evidence about asbestos-free talc, which is still widely used, is less clear," the American Cancer Society said. Some studies on animals have shown that talc can cause tumors, but others have not. Studies exploring potential links between talcum powder an ovarian cancer in women who use talc-based feminine hygiene products have also had mixed results. The most reliable types of studies, which don’t rely on a woman’s memory of whether she used talc, have shown no evidence talcum powder causes ovarian cancer.

“No increased risk of lung cancer has been reported with the use of cosmetic talcum powder,” the American Cancer Society says.

Did talc cause the plaintiff’s ovarian cancer?

It’s almost impossible to prove that any single person’s cancer was caused by something specific. In some types of cancer, such as lung cancer, there are very clear and accepted causes, such as tobacco smoke and asbestos. In others, there may be a generally accepted link, such as sunlight or tanning beds and skin cancer, or chemicals such as benzene and blood cancers.

Ovarian cancer is not common. It affects about 21,000 U.S. women a year, and while there are clear genetic causes, doctors don’t know what causes most cases. Because it’s usually diagnosed too late to cure it, it kills most patients and is the fifth leading cause of cancer death among women.

The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), the cancer arm of the World Health Organization, says genital use of talc-based body powder is “possibly carcinogenic to humans.”

“For any individual woman, if there is an increased risk, the overall increase is likely to very be small,” the American Cancer Society says. “Still, talc is widely used in many products, so it is important to determine if the increased risk is real. Research in this area continues.”

Is there still talc in baby powder?

Johnson’s baby powder contains talc , according to the company’s website, but the company also offers a version made with cornstarch.

Shower to Shower, the product named in both lawsuits Johnson has lost, contains both talc and cornstarch.

Many baby and body powder products are now made using cornstarch. “There is no evidence at this time linking cornstarch powders with any form of cancer,” the American Cancer Society says.

Maggie Fox is a senior writer for NBC News and TODAY, covering health policy, science, medical treatments and disease.

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Johnson & Johnson to pay $700 million to 42 states in talc baby powder lawsuit

Johnson & Johnson will pay $700 million to settle a lawsuit by dozens of states that accused the pharmaceutical industry giant of intentionally misleading customers about the safety of its talc-based baby powder, officials announced.

J&J sold products with talc for more than 100 years before discontinuing them globally in 2023 after facing thousands of lawsuits. The coalition of 43 attorneys general found Johnson & Johnson failed to disclose that the talc sometimes contained asbestos and that asbestos is harmful and can lead to cancer.

Johnson & Johnson baby powder is now largely made from corn starch rather than talc. The company did not admit guilt as part of the settlement.

“We have reached a landmark settlement with Johnson & Johnson ensuring that the company will abide by the law and take effective steps to protect consumers from potentially hazardous ingredients,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a statement Tuesday. “I’m proud to lead this coalition of 43 attorneys general to stand up for consumers’ health and truth in marketing.” 

Attorneys general for Texas, Florida and North Carolina led the multistate litigation. Judicial approval of the settlement is still pending.

The talcum powder lawsuit was joined by Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Washington D.C., Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington state, West Virginia and Wisconsin.

"This is a major advancement for consumer product safety," Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody said in a statement Tuesday.

Johnson & Johnson faces slew of other lawsuits

The payout announced Tuesday is the latest J&J has agreed to in a yearslong string of lawsuits alleging its products caused serious – sometimes deadly – illnesses.

A Chicago jury in April awarded $45 million to the family of a woman who died from mesothelioma, a cancer linked to asbestos exposure. Theresa Garcia’s family said her frequent use of J&J's talc-based products led to the fatal diagnosis.

In New Jersey, Johnson & Johnson was ordered to pay $186 million to four plaintiffs in a 2020 lawsuit that claimed baby powder caused their cancer.

And earlier this month, an Oregon woman who said she developed mesothelioma from using J&J’s talc-based products was awarded $260 million in damages, WTVR reported.

Johnson & Johnson still faces tens of thousands of individual lawsuits alleging that talc-containing products led consumers to develop severe health problems, according to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

A class action suit that accuses the company of having hidden the dangers of talc products from shareholders is also pending.

Johnson & Johnson has made several attempts to resolve the cases by placing a subsidiary that it created to contain its talc-related liabilities into bankruptcy, Reuters reported , with as much as $11 billion earmarked for potential payments, but courts have not approved such efforts.

"The Company continues to pursue several paths to achieve a comprehensive and final resolution of the talc litigation," Erik Haas, Johnson & Johnson worldwide vice president of litigation, said in a statement Tuesday. "We will continue to address the claims of those who do not want to participate in our contemplated consensual bankruptcy resolution through litigation or settlement.”

Lawsuit: Johnson & Johnson marketed baby powder to Black women amid cancer concerns

Are talc-based products safe?

Talc is a naturally occurring mineral used in cosmetics and personal care products such as baby powder and blush, according to the Food and Drug Administration. It is used to absorb moisture or improve the feel of a product.

The mineral is sometimes found in mines with asbestos, which can lead to contamination. Inhalation of asbestos has been linked to cancer, the FDA warns. Questions about potential contamination have been raised since the 1970s.

Talc that contains asbestos is "generally accepted as being able to cause cancer if it is inhaled," the American Cancer Society said. But the link between asbestos-free talc and cancer is unclear. The FDA said researchers have suggested a possible connection between talc-based powders used in the genital area and development of ovarian cancer since the 1960s, but studies have not conclusively determined whether they are related.

Johnson & Johnson has denied its baby powder contains asbestos.

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Explained: What is the controversy around J&J's talc-based baby powder?

Johnson and johnson (j&j) has been facing several thousand lawsuits from women who claim that they developed ovarian cancer after using the product.

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Legal-Bay Lawsuit Funding Says J&J Inching Closer to Landmark Talcum Powder Settlement

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Sep 09, 2024, 09:46 ET

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Total settlement now expected to be $9.2 Billion , as J&J secures more votes to get approval via bankruptcy

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. , Sept. 9, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Legal-Bay LLC, the premier Pre Settlement Funding Company, reports that Johnson & Johnson has just added $1.2 BB to their previously agreed upon settlement. The pharmaceutical giant has been under fire for their talc-based baby powder which thousands of plaintiffs allege is directly responsible for their mesothelioma or ovarian cancer. J&J has been the target of legal filings for decades, but it wasn't until recently that any major negotiations have been reached. This past June, a bankruptcy filing previously allowed for a $6.475 BB payout to the almost 60,000 plaintiffs. But now, J&J has received additional votes to get them over the top of the threshold needed to get this new $9.2 BB settlement approval.

Victims have waited a long time for major damages to be awarded but due to size of the class will now only receive small amounts of money for the serious medical issues they've been battling. Legal-Bay expects average settlement values or settlement amounts to be in the $50K to $150K range depending on individual factors, and predicts that payouts may take two years to fully resolve. For victims who need money now and would rather not wait, Legal-Bay can assist.

Chris Janish , CEO of Legal Bay, says, "By upping the ante and securing more votes, J&J and victims of ovarian cancer are closer to seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.  When all is said and done, the talcum powder lawsuit will most likely be the largest product liability mass tort settlement in history. However, there is still a long way to go toward resolving and paying victims once all court proceedings are concluded."

Legal-Bay has monitored this litigation from its inception and is evaluating all cases on a case by case basis based on this breaking news. To apply for a cash advance lawsuit loan from your anticipated Johnson & Johnson talc baby powder lawsuit settlement, please visit the company's website HERE or call 877.571.0405.   

Several studies dating back to the 1970s concluded that talc particles increase a woman's risk of ovarian cancer, and court documents have revealed that J&J knew its talc contained asbestos as early as the 1950s. However, despite the settlement, J&J continues to stand by the safety of their product, and denies that asbestos was ever an ingredient used in its manufacturing. They have vehemently defended themselves against such claims, stating confidently that they have prevailed in 95% of the ovarian cancer lawsuits up until now. With this latest settlement development, the New Jersey -based company hopes to close out their legal troubles once and for all.

Legal-Bay is one of the few legal funding companies who are providing some financial relief to talcum powder lawsuit plaintiffs and their families with risk-free, non-recourse cash advance settlement loans. They have been a leader in the mass tort arena for over fifteen years and have vast experience within this space. Mass tort litigations are complex, and Legal Bay has the knowledge and understanding to help plaintiffs navigate the complicated waters of the legal system.

If you're a plaintiff in an active Johnson & Johnson talcum powder lawsuit and need an immediate cash advance from your anticipated settlement, please visit the company's website HERE or call 877.571.0405 where agents are standing by to hear about your specific case. 

Legal-Bay is one of the best lawsuit loan companies when it comes to mass tort litigations, and is currently the #1 talc funding company in the industry. Legal-Bay assists plaintiffs in all types of class action and mass tort lawsuits, including: Round Up, JUUL e-cigarettes, 3M , Hernia Mesh, IVC Filters, Roundup, Essure, Exactech hip and knee recall, and more.

Legal-Bay assists plaintiffs in all other types of lawsuits, including personal injury, slips and falls, car, boat, or construction accidents, medical malpractice, wrongful death, dog bites, police brutality, sexual assault, sexual abuse, judgment or verdict on appeal, commercial litigation, contract dispute, Qui-tam or whistleblower cases, False Claims Act, patent litigation, copyright infringement, and more.

Legal-Bay's loan for settlement funding programs are designed to provide immediate cash in advance of a plaintiff's anticipated monetary award. While it's common to refer to these legal funding requests as settlement loans, loans for settlements, law suit loans, loans for lawsuits, etc., the "lawsuit loan" funds are, in fact, non-recourse. That means there's no risk when it comes to loans in lawsuit settlements because there is no obligation to repay the money if the recipient loses their case. Therefore, terms like settlement loan, loans for lawsuit, loans on settlement, or lawsuit loan funds don't necessarily apply, as the "loan on lawsuit" isn't really a loan at all, but rather a stress-free cash advance.

Legal-Bay is known to many as the best lawsuit funding provider in the industry for their helpful and knowledgeable staff, and one of the best lawsuit loan companies overall for their low rates and quick turnaround, sometimes within 24-48 hours once all documents have been received.

To apply right now for a loan settlement program, please visit the company's website HERE  or call toll-free at: 877.571.0405 where agents are standing by to answer any questions.

SOURCE Legal-Bay LLC

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Johnson & Johnson to End Talc-Based Baby Powder Sales in North America

The company has faced thousands of lawsuits from cancer patients who claim that its talc was contaminated with asbestos, a known carcinogen, and that the company knew of the risks.

By Tiffany Hsu and Roni Caryn Rabin

Johnson & Johnson is discontinuing North American sales of its talc-based baby powder, a product that once defined the company’s wholesome image and that it has defended for decades even as it faced thousands of lawsuits filed by patients who say it caused cancer .

The decision to wind down sales of the product is a huge concession for Johnson & Johnson, which has for more than a century promoted the powder as pure and gentle enough for babies.

The company said on Tuesday that it would allow existing bottles to be sold by retailers until they ran out. Baby powder made with cornstarch will remain available, and the company will continue to sell talc-based baby powder in other parts of the world.

Johnson & Johnson has often said that faulty testing, shoddy science and ill-equipped researchers are to blame for findings that its powder was contaminated with asbestos. But in recent years, thousands of people — mostly women with ovarian cancer — have said that the company did not warn them of potential risks that the company was discussing internally.

Even as it announced the withdrawal of its baby powder, the company said that it “will continue to vigorously defend the product” in court. But Johnson & Johnson acknowledged that demand for the talc-based version had slumped as consumer habits changed and concerns about the product spread.

For decades, baby powder’s main ingredient was talc, a mineral known for its softness. Sold in an iconic white bottle, its fragrance is said to be one of the most recognizable in the world.

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