people are dead but executives get away with just sharing some of their profit, not even all profit :) such an equal and wonderful world we make. lets blame some other thing
I'm not sure what the answer is, but despite how much everyone loves bashing "big corporate executives", I don't think it's a plus in our system that someone can be found liable for something completely contrary to scientific evidence.
The evidence that talc causes cancer is "limited at best" (I'll let people do their own searches and come to their own conclusions). But to me this seems similar to silicone breast implants, where billions were paid out and companies bankrupted despite the fact that there is essentially no scientific evidence that silicone breast implants cause cancer.
Talc deposits are often found around asbestos ore. From what I can tell the issue is cross contamination rather than talcum powder itself being carcinogenic.
I'm not motivated to do real research (reading entire source papers/testimony), but every time I look into this, the info is really frustrating and unclear. There seems to be a lot of noise (on one side, corporate self-preservation; and on the other, overly un-objective anti-corporate sentiment).
As far as I can tell, talc can be contaminated with asbestos, but you can test for this and use processes that avoid/remedy the contamination, which J&J ostensibly did - meanwhile, the cases against them seem statistically meaningless as described in all the articles. And then every time a scientific link to cancer is mentioned, it's never made clear if the link is significant, and whether the link is from mined talc that might be contaminated, pure talc, or the J&J product on the shelves which might be contaminated, only the latter two being meaningful. And regardless, J&J claims this link is junk science, and are confident enough to be suing to prove that, so I guess I look forward to seeing the result of that.
The only case that seemed significant was that J&J was found to have covered up contamination, but they seem to continue to contest this and I can't find any details on what the evidence was. E.g. is J&J claiming it wasn't contaminated, or are they claiming it was, but not to dangerous levels even over decades of use?
> The only case that seemed significant was that J&J was found to have covered up contamination, but they seem to continue to contest this and I can't find any details on what the evidence was. E.g. is J&J claiming it wasn't contaminated, or are they claiming it was, but not to dangerous levels even over decades of use?
This article doesn't go into the details too deeply but however bad it was, sounds like it went on for a while...
> As far as I can tell, talc can be contaminated with asbestos, but you can test for this and use processes that avoid/remedy the contamination, which J&J ostensibly did
They tested, found asbestos, then lied to the FDA saying that there wasn't any when there had been, tried to get the FDA to allow certain amounts of asbestos in their products, and when faced with lawsuits repeatedly obstructed efforts to get their internal documentation/communication on the subject.
> meanwhile, the cases against them seem statistically meaningless as described in all the articles.
That's a bizarre metric. How many people who got cancer would have detected it, realized that it was from baby powder, had the time, strength, and money (while fighting cancer) to get lawyers and go to court over it?
I don't believe this is accurate. There are concerns that talc can be contaminated with asbestos, but (a) asbestos was largely removed from talc for sale in the US in the mid 70s as your Wikipedia link points out (and additional info in the link below), (b) the concern with asbestos contamination is largely related to inhalation and lung cancer - I haven't even seen much in the form of hypotheses that it is a factor in ovarian cancer, and (c) given a and b the concern is largely with talc mining and the miners involved, not people who use talc-based baby powder.
> he concern with asbestos contamination is largely related to inhalation and lung cancer - I haven't even seen much in the form of hypotheses that it is a factor in ovarian cancer
Someone above linked to this: Asbestos Exposure and Ovarian Cancer: A Meta-analysis (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S209379112...) which concludes: "This meta-analysis provides evidence of a significant association between asbestos exposure and ovarian cancer mortality."
You might not be aware of any hypotheses that asbestos is a factor in ovarian cancer, but it seems others have for a very long time. In 2017 Germany considered ovarian cancer caused by asbestos to be an occupational disease. A link between talc and ovarian cancer was suggested back in the 1960s.
Talc, as something that causes cancer, has been being researched for a very very long time.
> The evidence that talc causes cancer is "limited at best"
Yet appears to have become an article of faith for many on here; a least judging by the downvoting and ridicule heaped on those who dared question the narrative (and questionable evidence) in earlier posts.
Frankly, this appears to be a US thing, as nobody has heard of this supposed link in Blighty.
The bigger impact than the fine is I don't see people using baby powder any more. I lean toward the probably not side of the talc-cancer link, but I didn't use baby powder for my kids because it's purely a nice-to-have convenience product.
Nice-to-have convenience products are very easy to drop at the slightest potential health risk, and that's what I've seen with baby powder (I'm not seeing much uptake on the alternatives because the talc-cancer link gives a vague maybe-need-to-be-cautious taint to the product category as a whole).
I would be interested to hear if someone thinks that usage of baby powder is still popular and my anecdote-based sense of things is wrong.
I don't know why knowing the geological fact that talc contains trace amounts of asbestos is supposed to sound so guilty.
My children's school district contains way more than a trace amount of asbestos. The administrators there know it. They aren't in federal court for failing to slap a warning label on the schools.
I'm not going to weigh in on the J&J issue, but that's a bad comparison. Asbestos can't do any harm if it doesn't get inside your body. Powdered asbestos (as would be found in talcum powder) can very easily do that, but asbestos bound up in building materials can't do that if left undisturbed. Most things that could disturb asbestos are planned in advance, and as long as the presence of asbestos is known it can be worked around, so asbestos in building materials is not particularly hazardous.
> My children's school district contains way more than a trace amount of asbestos.
They should probably be warning people of the danger and if they are in violation of the laws concerning asbestos the school district should be taken to court.
One thing is clear, don't grind up your children's school district and then rub it all over a baby's genitals.
> One of these, published in 1993, was a US National Toxicology Program report, which found that cosmetic grade talc containing no asbestos-like fibres was correlated with tumor formation in rats
"rats forced to inhale talc for 6 hours a day, five days a week over at least 113 weeks."
Thats a lot different than applying it to your body. If I inhale sand for 6 hours a day for 113 weeks I would not be surprised to get tumors as well, I still go to the beach.
Most things around us we touch could cause tumors if we inhaled them constantly over time.
In nature, the majority of talc deposits also contain asbestos. Even worse, the form of asbestos in those deposits is the most cancerous form of it.
So basically what was happening was that women were using baby powder as a absorbent to keep their lady parts feeling fresh, but were introducing a whole bunch of asbestos in the process. This is on top of the dubious idea of putting talc on your hoo-haa to begin with.
"This is on top of the dubious idea of putting talc on your hoo-haa to begin with"
Not so uncommon where I live. BTW, baby girls ALSO have ovaries, and they use talc for prolonged periods of time.
I also use talc in my groin. Not often, but still. Prostate cancer is not a concern for older males (we all develop it some time), but testicular cancer is a thing (mostly in children)
While it is a concern, I think all males 'get it' if they advance enough in years.
I remember reading somewhere that if you biopsied those that died of 'old-age' then it would be present in some form. So it's not a question of if, but when, and when, whether it'll be the thing that gets you before something else gives out.
I think a lot of men get it but it progresses so slowly that you'll likely be dead from something else (likely another cancer) before the prostate cancer gets you.
Prostate cancer becomes more commonplace as men grow older, but also less virulent.
An urologist whom I helped with typesetting of his PhD thesis (in LaTeX, funny guy) told me once that in patients over 70, basically everyone has some cancerous cells in his biopsy samples, but that these usually aren't actually dangerous to the patients.
I am more concerned about the surgery to unblock the urethra, which is often needed, becauseof the urinary incontinence that might result from it.
Prostate cancer, as others have mentioned, is guaranteed, like death. But it is not something that affects most men's life beyond the worry of getting it.
Going offtopic: Colorectal cancer is a more pressing matter for older adults. Correct Screening saves lives.
The talc they were sourcing was riddled with asbestos, which they covered up for years. Asbestos’s carcinogenic nature is unique in that the physical shape of the fibers is what causes the cancers. So many of the cancers implicated here were due to the typical path of women breathing the powder in while applying to their babies, etc, but the ovarian ones were likely caused by women applying talc to their perineum following birth or surgery - the asbestos fibers would be introduced into the vagina and ‘burrow’ into the cells where they cause similar cancers to mesothelioma or actually interfere with mitosis due to being similarly sized to chromosomes.
It’s not too far fetched since the uterus and lungs are both lined with similar types of epithelial and mucosal cells.
It was allegedly contaminated beyond a couple of confirmed samples that contained very low levels. It was never demonstrated that the issue was widespread or that any plaintiff had ever purchased a contaminated product.
That isn't to say that there isn't/wasn't a problem, but "sourcing was riddled with asbestos" is a gross overstatement.
What I'm saying specifically is that only a few samples of talc over many years ever tested positive for any asbestos at all. It is likely that most of the plaintiffs were never actually exposed at all.
The burden of proof in civil cases is "a preponderance of the evidence", which is basically legalese for 51% likely or better.
That said, it is quite possible that pure talc itself is dangerous to epithelial cells but that's not well established yet.
Part of the issue is that several of the mines that J&J sourced its talc from were known to have asbestos, which some of their tests discovered — and then we left it up to the company for the next 50 years to continue their own testing and disclosure… it strains credulity that some tests at eg Windsor Mines showed “rather high” levels of asbestos fibers and then they completely stopped finding fibers from the same mine later on.
A responsible company would have stopped sourcing talc from asbestos-containing mines in favor of many other slightly more expensive sources that never showed any asbestos. J&J didn’t.
That's not to say there aren't a bunch of shady lawyers filing suits on behalf of people who didn't actually have provable damages from the products - but I think it's okay to hold companies to very high standards in cases like this.
It’s hard to know what to make of it, since there isn’t really much evidence of asbestos in the consumer product itself. The evidence is all circumstantial, which is my point. Maybe something happened but the bar for civil litigation is low, and it doesn’t really prove anything.
The problem with that, is that the company investigated itself and found no problems. And as others pointed out, the mines were known to contain asbestos and they continued anyway.
It does seem sporadic on whether it ends up in the product, but since we're talking about product from 40-50 years ago, it's hard to say what was present in the old product.
Notably - in the 1950s, the USGS published guides on where to mine asbestos in the US [1]. This map is the precise geo coordinates that the USGS included for the Ludlow site and then the site of the Vermont J&J talc mine... literally 2 miles between the two. So again, consider my credulity strained that the only found contamination a handful of times decades ago mining talc directly next to known asbestos deposits.
A 2 mile distance is highly circumstantial. There are several big leaps here. The potential pervasiveness of asbestos in the talc is not well established. The exposure of the plaintiffs is not established. The link between trace asbestos in talc and the cancer in question is not well established. No other complicating factors were ruled out. It's just maybes all the way down.
Yes it is possible that J&J was careless, and the the product was tainted, and these plaintiffs were exposed, and their cancer was caused by that exposure but the evidence is VERY thin.
This seems well into the realm of reactionary, and I'd love to avoid it on HN in particular. The physical and chemical worlds are absolutely chock full of things that sound terrifying, but pose no practical harm in low quantities over a human lifetime and are virtually impossible to truly 100% avoid. When you combine these two facts, you get important real-world concepts like "acceptable levels" or "acceptable durations" or exposure type distinction (e.g. inhalation vs contact).
This is the reason we don't let people who think in terms of "how many microscopic needles is it okay to have in my daughter's vagina" make legal decisions. It's the same reason we don't let victims decide the punishment for crimes.
> This is the reason we don't let people who think in terms
Well, in the world of civil lawsuits we do exactly this, which is sort of my overarching point here. Not much can be concluded from the settlement other than J&J being tired of litigation.
This is not reactionary. This is what happens when you put talk on the butt of a baby girl each day until she's diaper free. If the quantity is detectable then it's far greater than the Avogadro number. These are physical needles that stay there over the years. How do you even study that?The safety studies have been done or financed by the same groups of companies that are getting sued. Chronic diseases are up in America since the rise of chemical industries in America.
But the literature on this is incredibly light. The idea that asbestos messes with chromosomes is wild! And not at all similar to what happens in the lungs.
And the correlation here is really weak - all women who developed ovarian cancer and also happened to use talc at some point in their lives.
The most obvious would be asbestos contamination. There was for example a Reuters investigation in 2018 that claims J&J were aware of test showing asbestos in some of their talc.
Looks like there are also suspicions towards talc itself, but it might be hard to prove that J&J was negligent in that regard. Unless there's been some cover-up that I/we don't know about.
How can they get a fine this small for a dangerous product they pushed onto markets globally for several decades? There really should be retroactive punishment and fines for past executives and clawing back of money from them and past shareholders.
Also am I reading this right? J&J formed a subsidiary that’ll absorb these liabilities? How is that legal? What happens if that subsidiary disappears? Couldn’t any company conceivably let go of their liabilities by putting it in some other company?
The courts seem to have some power here, see this quote from the article:
>The company tried filing LTL in bankruptcy twice before — and both times the case was rejected as courts ruled the parent company was financially capable of paying the claims without bankruptcy protection.
Yes, but compared to the alternative where the parent company is responsible for an unknown amount of liabilities, capping ones liabilities at 6.5 billion might be better for shareholders.
Are film studios valued less after a blockbuster? And yet, almost every US movie, good or not has a company set up for it and that company spends cash and gets closed down after filming ends. So they cannot be sued and the studios cannot be sued. It's a good old US tradition.
This was their plan. I encourage you, and everyone who is a US citizen, to write/call your representatives. Tell them you want corporate heads to have personal liability for these issues. Tell them to dispose of Citizens United.
> Also am I reading this right? J&J formed a subsidiary that’ll absorb these liabilities? How is that legal? What happens if that subsidiary disappears? Couldn’t any company conceivably let go of their liabilities by putting it in some other company?
I'm still of the belief that the judgement was wrong. The link between asbestos and ovarian cancer is incredibly weak, let alone enough to indicate causality.
The amount of asbestos actually found in the powder was ridiculously low.
The only smoking gun was some internal emails where executives had some higher than baseline internal tests and they argued about the accuracy/reliability of them.
Based on everything I have read, I would not be concerned in the slightest about using Talc powder.
Asbestos was bad, but people have been conditioned to overrate it's danger to casual exposure because of the lifelong exposure to mesothelioma litigation where lawyers had a field day.
First of all this was a study of women who worked with asbestos in an industrial setting. Not casual trace exposure.
Secondly, this only establishes a correlation (and a relatively weak one at that). But there are lots of other plausible links between choosing to work in a low income asbestos industry and ovarian cancer.
and the people suing used J&J baby powder their entire lives and put it on their infants. J&J also hid its findings from federal regulators, which doesn't make them seem as innocent as you're making them out to be.
I could be wrong, but the report seems to be that some mines contained asbestos, but that it was manageable, so the only relevant finding was that their end product "sometimes tested positive" for "small amounts" of asbestos during a 30-something-year period. Did the amount/frequency represent a legal responsibility to report it? Did it represent a moral responsibility, based on known science? I haven't seen much about that, and I'd love to hear from some source that at least appears to be attempting objectivity.
That's the thing - billions of people use talc products regularly. Millions develop ovarian cancer naturally. A small group of talc users suing
I'm not saying J&J did nothing wrong, but if you read the documents their testing scheme actually far exceeded the federal requirements and they regularly changed suppliers if they felt there was a risk of asbestos. Them throwing out outlier test data is only suspicious with the post-hoc assumption they were guilty of hiding something.
Those millions developing cancer naturally are an assumption - this is the issue with products that are so widespread that we don’t have a solid control group.
Certain other medical products imposed on the population raise similar concerns…
Talc is a rock. Rocks co-mingle with many minerals. As a rockhound, this is super evident. Tiger's eye is basically sealed in Asbestos. If you cut it with a tile saw you'll get very unhealthy tiny knives in your cells.
Rock powders are generally very harmful for people. Tile/countertop cutters get sick after working about 5-10 years, and that's with PPE.
My experience is that corn starch is a terrible substitute.
It's basically a complex carbohydrate. It's not inert, bacteria can feed on it. It tends to clump when wet. Seems like the exact opposite of what you'd want to put on potentially sweaty parts.
Talc is fantastic - it's basically an inert mineral. It can get wet, and it's still talc. Bacteria can't feed on it.
I wouldn't just lump all "rock powders" together in terms of risk. Asbestos is risky because of it's physical form and iron content. Other minerals don't have the same risk.
I would avoid inhaling any powders in general - whether rock powder or not.
I've been following this litigation for a long time, and everything in this post is right. The scientific evidence of a causal link between talc usage and ovarian cancer simply doesn't exist.
What does exist: extremely sympathetic cancer patients that used talc, a faceless multinational corporation as defendant, a few documents in what was a huge amount of discovery that suggest disagreement over quality controls approaches and confidence in results, a bunch of plaintiff's attorneys on contingency-fees.
Add in a significant dose of innuendo and hand-waving and you're eventually going to find a jury that'll give you a billion dollar verdict, and so it happened.
They've known about this issue for a long, long time and decided to just change who they sell it to from wealthy, "discerning" people to groups of lower socioeconomic status. This will be a tarnish on J&J's reputation for a very long time.
As a hobby ceramicist, I must acknowledge a certain amount of grumpiness borne from what the talc allegations have done to our niche community.
Talc is used extensively in low-mid fire clay bodies as well as an additive to increase plasticity (makes clay easier to work with), and is an excellent source of MgO for fluxing glazes. In short, it's a great material to have in our cabinet [1]. But now there are essentially no more talc sources in the US and the ripple effect seen in our suppliers and manufactures has been a big shock (we are ever at the mercy of big industry!).
But I honestly just don't get the link to ovarian cancer. Chronic exposure to asbestos causing lung cancer, sure, if it were present in talc in high amounts (which is somewhat dubious in the case of talcum powder). Ultimately I have to conclude that J&J, with all of its billions of dollars and army of lawyers, couldn't find a way out of this. So either the research is dated and needs to be reviewed because there is something going on with talc that we don't understand (unlikely, imho), or I'm left speculating that there is something else motivating them to avoid closer scrutiny of their products.
Tire talc is still used on light aircraft tire tubes. I stocked up on a bunch, but it still seems to be widely available. Maybe it's fundamentally a different product than the J&J baby stuff...?
> Ultimately I have to conclude, that J&J with all of its billions of dollars and army of lawyers, couldn't find a way out of this.
As I understand it, J&J executives moved to bury data rather than investigating. In addition, J&J specifically targeted minorities proclaiming dubious "benefits" at the same time they were burying anything to the contrary.
Consequently, it doesn't really matter whether there is or isn't a link. The optics are so terrible that J&J is going to lose badly if brought to trial.
This is the whole "silicone breast implants" thing all over. In the end, the silicone implants were not at fault, but the behavior of the responsible company was sufficiently reprehensible that they were going to lose no matter what.
Women were marketed to put this on their labia every day in order to feel "fresh and clean". This is a very dubious benefit given that feminine hygiene products like this tend to cause more irritation and problems than they prevent.
This wasn't about avoiding swamp-ass from working in the hot sun even if my feet concur with you about the effectiveness of talc and the uselessness of cornstarch.
Talc has been used for humans for thousands of years for every purpose imaginable. It's weird to single out a specific single use as being particularly malicious.
Well, it doesn't matter. It's gone for everyone and every use case now.
J&J has left the business, but there are other companies. You probably can’t buy it at the corner store anymore, but it’s available online. I just looked on Amazon and 1 lb is $23.
Can you please make your substantive points without snark or crossing into personal attack? You're welcome to share your experience here—we just want to avoid degrading to internet default if possible.
> But I honestly just don't get the link to ovarian cancer.
What does that mean and what does it signify? Do you know enough about cancer, microbiology, the female reproductive system, etc. that you would 'get' it and that you trust your intuition?
I don't 'get' much of advanced mathematics, but that doesn't at all invalidate it in my mind, or represent evidence to others.
Is your post more than, 'I kinda wish I didn't know the facts here' - a human reaction to bad news.
Mesothelioma is not a "real" cancer in the traditional sense.
Your body has no way to expel fine asbestos fibers, and so they collect in your lungs and shred up the insides. When your body tries to respond by healing, it instead forms growths that constantly re-cut and heal themselves. So it's a type of cancer, but it's unique in that it's not based on malformed DNA.
So the idea that just being in the presence of asbestos is enough to form self-propagating cancers like it's some sort of radioactive isotope... doesn't make any sense. Asbestos on it's own is completely inert.
It's an improbably claim that requires extraordinary evidence.
My old friend with no history of asbestos exposure, a sysadmin no less, died of mesothelioma last year. I only learnt that yesterday. (We grew apart...)
I spent an hour reading about that cancer. It seems that mesotheliomas without previous known asbestos exposure do occur.
> the idea that just being in the presence of asbestos is enough to form self-propagating cancers like it's some sort of radioactive isotope... doesn't make any sense.
It doesn't make sense to you and therefore is worth exploring. At the same time, unless one is an expert then the fact that they don't understand isn't much evidence that it's untrue.
Most people don't understand much about my field of expertise; their lack of knowledge doesn't invalidate most of my field.
Talc is used medically as a treatment for recurrent pleural effusions. It is introduced into the pleural space and triggers an intensely inflammatory reaction which more or less fuses the pleura together to prevent the accumulation of fluid (pleurodesis).
When a patient who has had a pleurodesis gets an FDG PETCT, they will have intense accumulation of radiotracer for years. It is very inflammatory. Even more so than asbestos.
I wouldn’t want talc anywhere inside my reproductive tract or anywhere inside my body if I could avoid it.
If you buy the chronic inflammation leads to cancer hypothesis, talc leading to cancer is not so far fetched.
Location matters. The immune system reacts differently to foreign bodies depending on what tissue is in contact with it.
Damn near anything you add to the plural space is going to send your immune system into overdrive - the cells that line the plural cavity (mesothelial cells) are programmed to respond a certain way to their environment.
Contrast that with the cell that line your respiratory tract. There are cells that produce mucus, cells with cilia that sweep the mucus away from the lungs. They don't respond with a massive inflammatory reaction to foreign substances like the plural space does (at least not in a healthy human - asthma patients are different).
Same with the reproductive tract, especially the female one. We can insert IUDs into the uterine cavity without a massive inflammatory response.
Your last paper is particularly interesting! Not only the results, but also the disclaimer!
"The authors declare the following competing financial interest(s): J.J.G., W.R.W., and D.W.C. have served as consultants and provided expert testimony in talc and other environmental litigation."
Ok, well good to set the context here.
But lets look at the results of the controls (no talc exposure) where the conclusions are remarkably cryptic, but I think we can figure it out!
The paper looked at tissue samples from ovarian cancer patients - a group of six who reported decades of talc use on their bottom and six who said they didn't use talc.
They used two techniques - polarizing light microscopy (very simple technique to look for polarizing molecules like talc) and then SEM/EDX which uses an electron beam and then measures x-rays emitted to identify exactly what the particles are.
"Polarizing light microscopy, as shown in the table, revealed a range of two to 17 birefringent particles per slide; these values are comparable to the lower end of the polarizing light microscopy results of the exposed patient"
Conclusion: using the same initial technique, we actually see the same particles (suspected talc) in the controls, but "at the lower end of the range for exposed patients". Very vague, but we can conclude they saw suspected talc in the unexposed patients but on the lower end of the range for the exposed. But that means the two groups overlapped in suspected talc particles.
Well, we better confirm those results with another analytical technique to confirm it's talc, right?
"Correlative SEM/EDX of the control tissue blocks showed a total of four talc particles across all patients: two in patient 2 (right ovary) and two in patient 3 (right fallopian tube). Of note, in Supplementary Table 1, both these patients had pelvic surgery more than 30 years prior to their ovarian cancer surgical procedure."
Oh crap! Those are talc particles in the tissue in the people not exposed to talc. Where did it come from? Oh, but it's probably the surgery they underwent prior!
Which on the surface makes sense - gloves, instruments, gauze, needles might have talc particles on them. Hell, all these tissue samples were removed and then handles by a lab as well - a ton of more exposure to talc is possible! In both the test and control subjects.
But anyways, yeah, it was introduced during surgery, that explains why we see talc in the non-exposed controls. But wait!
"Among the five patients in the main study, two had a history of tubal ligation"
Oh man! The patients that did use talc had surgery too! But the article doesn't call out the contradiction - if the reason for the talc in the controls is surgery, and your test subjects also had surgery, then you should find talc too! They just call out the surgery in an attempt to claim that with a tubal ligation, talc should be blocked from moving up the fallopian tubes. They don't even realize they contradicted their own results.
Jesus Christ this is a terrible, terrible paper. Written up and published for the sole purpose of trial lawyers - the authors had made plenty of money testifying to that fact.
Then on top, they do a bunch of hand wavy stuff to explain away the talc in the samples of the non-exposed, but don't realize at the same time they are explaining away the results in the people exposed too.
> They just call out the surgery in an attempt to claim that with a tubal ligation, talc should be blocked from moving up the fallopian tubes. They don't even realize they contradicted their own results.
They did address this and noted that in patients with tubal ligation the talc distribution was different and lymphatic rather than “mechanical” through the fallopian tubes.
Still not sure what your angle is here.
It’s known that talc is inflammatory. It’s literally used with that intention medically. We don’t use powdered latex gloves in the modern day nearly as frequently as before, mostly because of latex allergy but also due to concerns that talc exposure leads to worse peritoneal scarring/adhesions.
The fact that talc is present inside the surgical specimens is bad in and of itself, regardless of how it got there. That implies an environmental cause for the malignancy, a la asbestos or smoking.
> So it's a type of cancer, but it's unique in that it's not based on malformed DNA.
This is absolutely incorrect.
Several genes are commonly mutated in mesothelioma, and may be prognostic factors. These include primarily BAP1, NF2, and TP53;[63] epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) and C-Met, receptor tyrosine kinases can also be altered and overexpressed in many mesotheliomas.
You’ve made a logical error here - you can basically say the same about every cancer.
The specific cancers that fit directly into the category you are carving out for mesothelioma are squamous and adénocarcinomas of the oesophagus, gastric mucosa and large bowel; lung cancers and other cancers of the epithelium.
The basic pathological process underlying cancer is cell dysplasia (usually caused by irritation/prolonged inflammation) which leads to metaplasia. Whether this is driven by a de novo mutation in that cell or from an external source is totally irrelevant and mesothelioma is certainly not unique in how it comes to fuck you up
J&J is winning virtually all of the suits that go to trial; it's just the ones they are losing end up with multi-billion dollar jury awards. A jury trial is not a quest for scientific truth, and a jury doesn't need to explain itself - the plaintiff lawyers (search your junk mail folder for the word "talc" to see what a great bunch they are) are going to keep rolling the dice in search of a sympathetic jury.
One thing that drives me nuts is that you can’t get pure talc in the US (baby powder has stuff added to it, including oils and fragrance; the oils can screw up plastic, etc over time).
The last time I looked, it was being sold as though it was a controlled substance alongside laboratory grade ethanol, etc.
On the one hand, baby powder causes ovarian cancer (there is evidence that this is true for talc that is not contaminated with asbestos, despite J&J’s long disinformation campaigns).
On the other, if you want to use it in an application where it is perfectly safe, it’s essentially impossible to buy an appropriate product.
This is such a weird topic. People should be skeptical as hell of corporations when it comes to safety and honesty, but everything about this one seems so tenuous. Not to say there is no fault, but the rulings just don't seem right as reported. Even the normally level-headed HN crowd are using verbiage like typical un-objective headline writers:
"riddled with asbestos"
"introducing a whole bunch of asbestos [while using baby powder]"
"[asbestos is] known for causing [cancer] for decades" (this is implicitly referring to inhalation - the link to ovarian cancer via genital contact is way, way less solid, isn't it?)
- is required and heavily incentivized by shareholders to maximize business value/output/growth at all costs
- is lead by people who cannot be held responsible for bad behavior (prison time)
You have to expect the worst. You have to assume they are going to do the absolute worst behavior they can get away with, that they will operate up to a millimeter away from the law, and sometimes go over the line if they think they can. The entire system is set up such that they would be foolish not to. IMO we should presume guilt instead of innocence when it comes to corporations--there is no reason to think they would voluntarily uphold some ethical or moral code if it meant lower profits.
Except that people in groups mostly aren't good. They just go along with what everybody else is doing and don't give any thought to the legal or ethical consequences. Of course there are exceptions, whistle-blowers for example, and they are often reviled by the "good" people.
You're alive is the most you can say. Would you say the same if you develop cancer in 5 years? There is and was no long term testing, so enjoy being the experiment. You can't pretend those makers are all perfect. Who was it that was hit with the largest criminal fine in US history? And for what? "marketing the drug with the intent to deceive and mislead the public" weird.
As someone who got all three shots, and has no regrets: There's nothing wrong with their logic, it's just that my risk tolerances change based on the context. If I'm escaping from, say, a war; I'm not going to complain if the last flight out of the country is a Boeing 737 MAX - at least not until I'm in a safe country and can switch planes. Likewise, the risk tolerances for vaccines are extremely low normally[1], but I'm willing to accept a slightly riskier one if it means not getting infected with an extremely risky novel coronavirus with very well documented negative effects.
Furthermore, the extremely politicized nature of the vaccine development process[0] constrains corporate misbehavior. In other words, the CEOs knew they had eyes on themselves and had to restrain themselves. Corporate misbehavior is far more likely when the public stops caring and corporations can start capturing regulatory agencies. In other words, their evil is very boring. "Company invents new vaccine that kills people" is an unusually sexy kind of evil, which means it gets unusually scrutinized. "Company neglects higher-than-average asbestos in talcum powder" is so boring nobody cares even after they get nasty cancer.
[0] Which, oddly enough, resulted in Trump getting booed for taking credit for the vaccine he funded.
[1] As far as I'm aware, these risks have not borne out into increased harm from the vaccines. I feel like there would have been a conservative media shitstorm if it had.
If a company invented a drug that kills people, I don't think "extreme politicization" would be necessary for that company to have eyes and scrutiny on it. That would happen naturally.
But in this case weren't the makers actually indemnified? Here's a CNBC article from 2020 called "You can’t sue Pfizer or Moderna if you have severe Covid vaccine side effects. The government likely won’t compensate you for damages." https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/16/covid-vaccine-side-effects-c...
Which were marketed as safe and effective and are now shown to be much less safe than disclosed and the manufacturers knew it (myocarditis and now a possible link to specific cancers[0]), and may or may not be effective depending on which study, cohort, and other factors.
Many people took them and were fine, but that doesn’t mean all people who took them were fine.[1]
Johnson and Johnson is very explicit NOT amoral. They have guiding principles that basically put the needs of their customers first, then employees, communities, and finally shareholders. [1]
These old companies were founded in a society that had clear values, and many of those companies reflect those values. Even modern companies frequently have moral values, for instance, Zappos. As a society, though, we have jettisoned those old, constraining Christian/Protestant values, and the prevailing value, to the extent I can identify it, is a Marxist, everything is just the use power to oppress. If we take that as our value system, then that is what we'll become. So if you don't like companies living out that value, then it behooves you to promote the kind of values that benefit society and bring people together.
Well for the last point, the method of action with asbestos is that it physically damages tissue and isn’t broken down by the body right? So any internal exposure would be cumulative. The question then is can small fibers migrate up to the ovaries. The prevalence of microplastics in the placenta suggests it’s at least plausible that small particles can migrate in unexpected ways.
It seems to me, that daily use of something with a small amount of asbestos near any orifice would be dangerous.
Well, in these cases it would be pretty easy to test for the presence of asbestos in these cancers. If it works like mesothelioma, it would still be present in the tissue.
However, it doesn't sound like anyone has actually done any testing like this.
But there's really not any evidence that talc for personal use actually contained any asbestos, other than some extremely vague indirect discussion of quality control parameters and testing quality confidence.
Even assuming that there was indeed a microscopic amount of asbestos in talc, you should be aware that you're breathing in probably ~5,000 asbestos fibers every day - that's about the ambient level from naturally occurring asbestos in air. If you do yard work, or you drive off-road, then you're probably getting more than that.
Matt Levine steelmanned this approach in a column.
What J&J tried to do was fund the subsidiary with however much they thought they'd be liable for and treat claimants as creditors to the bankrupt subsidiary. Bankruptcy law is designed to deal fairly with all creditors. The alternative is that a couple of gigantic judgments against J&J right at the beginning would leave no money for people who sued later.
The courts rejected this approach, not because of unfairness specifically, but because J&J had provided funding to the subsidiary. If the subsidiary has money, it can't be bankrupt yet.
If the subsidiary ultimately pays all claims to everyone who is entitled (a big if), it isn't necessarily wrong. [1] The one downside is claimants can't go after all of J&J's assets in the event of a huge victory.
I'm recounting all this from columns I read while back, so someone please correct me if I got details wrong.
>"So you might want to file for bankruptcy to pay off all your victims fairly and, perhaps, cheaply, even if their claims will not really “bankrupt” you in the traditional sense. But in fact that is kind of a drastic step, expensive and disruptive and risky and probably bad for shareholders. No chief executive officer of a big company wants to file for bankruptcy if it is not strictly necessary.
> There is a neater approach:
> -You put the liabilities in a box. You create a new subsidiary, you put the product-that-kills-people business in that subsidiary, and you transfer the liabilities related to that product to the subsidiary. This is, in general, hard to do, but in fact Texas has a weird merger law that allows it: You can “merge” your company into two companies, one with the liabilities and one with the rest of the business.
> -You have the box — the new subsidiary with all the product liabilities — file for bankruptcy. You get fair and consistent adjudication of the product claims, inside the box, and the rest of the company just goes along relatively normally.
> This is called the “Texas two-step.” In its extreme form it sounds like very bad cheating: You can’t really put all the liabilities and none of the money in the box; that is just a way to defraud victims, and surely they’d find a way to do something about it. But a milder form of the Texas Two-Step is that you put the liabilities in the box, put the box in bankruptcy, but have the parent company guarantee its product liabilities. (Perhaps up to some reasonable number, perhaps not.) Then you can say “no, we are not doing this to get out of paying our liabilities; we are doing it to pay them in a fairer and more consistent way.”
But this is only for ovarian cancer. I have a friend that is dying of mesothelioma and her case is still pending. She'll probably die before any judgement is made.
Actual ovarian cancer researcher here. To be perfectly honest, it is the first time I've heard of talc or asbestos being linked to ovarian cancer.
Mesothelioma is one thing. One of the drivers of malignant mesothelioma (which is caused by inhalation of asbestos) is a chronic state of inflammation caused by the inability to remove or degrade the asbestos fibers.
But in ovarian cancer the major mechanisms are not inflammatory in nature. Depending on the type (there are a few), usually it's a mutation in a key gene that then causes other, larger alterations in the chromosomes and ultimately a malignant outcome.
Now, mutations can be caused by inflammation (in particular due to the release of reactive oxygen species or ROS), but as fa as I'm aware, mechanisms of asbestos-like chronic inflammation being a cause (not a link, a cause, I mean with a molecular explanation) are not widely reported in literature and I haven't heard anything like that from my peers (much more knowledgeable than me on the topic).
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 214 ms ] threadThe evidence that talc causes cancer is "limited at best" (I'll let people do their own searches and come to their own conclusions). But to me this seems similar to silicone breast implants, where billions were paid out and companies bankrupted despite the fact that there is essentially no scientific evidence that silicone breast implants cause cancer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talc#Association_with_asbestos
As far as I can tell, talc can be contaminated with asbestos, but you can test for this and use processes that avoid/remedy the contamination, which J&J ostensibly did - meanwhile, the cases against them seem statistically meaningless as described in all the articles. And then every time a scientific link to cancer is mentioned, it's never made clear if the link is significant, and whether the link is from mined talc that might be contaminated, pure talc, or the J&J product on the shelves which might be contaminated, only the latter two being meaningful. And regardless, J&J claims this link is junk science, and are confident enough to be suing to prove that, so I guess I look forward to seeing the result of that.
The only case that seemed significant was that J&J was found to have covered up contamination, but they seem to continue to contest this and I can't find any details on what the evidence was. E.g. is J&J claiming it wasn't contaminated, or are they claiming it was, but not to dangerous levels even over decades of use?
Very annoying.
This article doesn't go into the details too deeply but however bad it was, sounds like it went on for a while...
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/johnson-johnson-k...
They tested, found asbestos, then lied to the FDA saying that there wasn't any when there had been, tried to get the FDA to allow certain amounts of asbestos in their products, and when faced with lawsuits repeatedly obstructed efforts to get their internal documentation/communication on the subject.
> meanwhile, the cases against them seem statistically meaningless as described in all the articles.
That's a bizarre metric. How many people who got cancer would have detected it, realized that it was from baby powder, had the time, strength, and money (while fighting cancer) to get lawyers and go to court over it?
https://www.cancer.org/cancer/risk-prevention/chemicals/talc...
Someone above linked to this: Asbestos Exposure and Ovarian Cancer: A Meta-analysis (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S209379112...) which concludes: "This meta-analysis provides evidence of a significant association between asbestos exposure and ovarian cancer mortality."
You might not be aware of any hypotheses that asbestos is a factor in ovarian cancer, but it seems others have for a very long time. In 2017 Germany considered ovarian cancer caused by asbestos to be an occupational disease. A link between talc and ovarian cancer was suggested back in the 1960s.
Talc, as something that causes cancer, has been being researched for a very very long time.
Yet appears to have become an article of faith for many on here; a least judging by the downvoting and ridicule heaped on those who dared question the narrative (and questionable evidence) in earlier posts.
Frankly, this appears to be a US thing, as nobody has heard of this supposed link in Blighty.
Nice-to-have convenience products are very easy to drop at the slightest potential health risk, and that's what I've seen with baby powder (I'm not seeing much uptake on the alternatives because the talc-cancer link gives a vague maybe-need-to-be-cautious taint to the product category as a whole).
I would be interested to hear if someone thinks that usage of baby powder is still popular and my anecdote-based sense of things is wrong.
The kicker: "Court documents have revealed that Johnson & Johnson knew its talc contained asbestos as early as the 1950s"
EDIT: just saw the sarcasm tag, sorry
My children's school district contains way more than a trace amount of asbestos. The administrators there know it. They aren't in federal court for failing to slap a warning label on the schools.
They should probably be warning people of the danger and if they are in violation of the laws concerning asbestos the school district should be taken to court.
One thing is clear, don't grind up your children's school district and then rub it all over a baby's genitals.
(Genuine question, not rhetorical, not intending to make any point with it)
> One of these, published in 1993, was a US National Toxicology Program report, which found that cosmetic grade talc containing no asbestos-like fibres was correlated with tumor formation in rats
Thats a lot different than applying it to your body. If I inhale sand for 6 hours a day for 113 weeks I would not be surprised to get tumors as well, I still go to the beach.
Most things around us we touch could cause tumors if we inhaled them constantly over time.
In nature, the majority of talc deposits also contain asbestos. Even worse, the form of asbestos in those deposits is the most cancerous form of it.
So basically what was happening was that women were using baby powder as a absorbent to keep their lady parts feeling fresh, but were introducing a whole bunch of asbestos in the process. This is on top of the dubious idea of putting talc on your hoo-haa to begin with.
Not so uncommon where I live. BTW, baby girls ALSO have ovaries, and they use talc for prolonged periods of time.
I also use talc in my groin. Not often, but still. Prostate cancer is not a concern for older males (we all develop it some time), but testicular cancer is a thing (mostly in children)
I’m sorry? What?
Prostate cancer is definitely a concern in males, and in no-way is it expected or an inevitability.
I remember reading somewhere that if you biopsied those that died of 'old-age' then it would be present in some form. So it's not a question of if, but when, and when, whether it'll be the thing that gets you before something else gives out.
An urologist whom I helped with typesetting of his PhD thesis (in LaTeX, funny guy) told me once that in patients over 70, basically everyone has some cancerous cells in his biopsy samples, but that these usually aren't actually dangerous to the patients.
Prostate cancer, as others have mentioned, is guaranteed, like death. But it is not something that affects most men's life beyond the worry of getting it.
Going offtopic: Colorectal cancer is a more pressing matter for older adults. Correct Screening saves lives.
It’s not too far fetched since the uterus and lungs are both lined with similar types of epithelial and mucosal cells.
It was allegedly contaminated beyond a couple of confirmed samples that contained very low levels. It was never demonstrated that the issue was widespread or that any plaintiff had ever purchased a contaminated product.
That isn't to say that there isn't/wasn't a problem, but "sourcing was riddled with asbestos" is a gross overstatement.
The burden of proof in civil cases is "a preponderance of the evidence", which is basically legalese for 51% likely or better.
That said, it is quite possible that pure talc itself is dangerous to epithelial cells but that's not well established yet.
A responsible company would have stopped sourcing talc from asbestos-containing mines in favor of many other slightly more expensive sources that never showed any asbestos. J&J didn’t.
That's not to say there aren't a bunch of shady lawyers filing suits on behalf of people who didn't actually have provable damages from the products - but I think it's okay to hold companies to very high standards in cases like this.
Notably - in the 1950s, the USGS published guides on where to mine asbestos in the US [1]. This map is the precise geo coordinates that the USGS included for the Ludlow site and then the site of the Vermont J&J talc mine... literally 2 miles between the two. So again, consider my credulity strained that the only found contamination a handful of times decades ago mining talc directly next to known asbestos deposits.
https://www.google.com/maps/dir/43.383623,-72.647868/Argonau...
[1] Page 7 in Windsor County: https://web.archive.org/web/20200319042340id_/https://pubs.u...
Yes it is possible that J&J was careless, and the the product was tainted, and these plaintiffs were exposed, and their cancer was caused by that exposure but the evidence is VERY thin.
This is the reason we don't let people who think in terms of "how many microscopic needles is it okay to have in my daughter's vagina" make legal decisions. It's the same reason we don't let victims decide the punishment for crimes.
Well, in the world of civil lawsuits we do exactly this, which is sort of my overarching point here. Not much can be concluded from the settlement other than J&J being tired of litigation.
And the correlation here is really weak - all women who developed ovarian cancer and also happened to use talc at some point in their lives.
Looks like there are also suspicions towards talc itself, but it might be hard to prove that J&J was negligent in that regard. Unless there's been some cover-up that I/we don't know about.
Abestos is not harmful just by touching it, you get cancer from it by breathing it in significant quantities over time (or ingesting it).
Also am I reading this right? J&J formed a subsidiary that’ll absorb these liabilities? How is that legal? What happens if that subsidiary disappears? Couldn’t any company conceivably let go of their liabilities by putting it in some other company?
>The company tried filing LTL in bankruptcy twice before — and both times the case was rejected as courts ruled the parent company was financially capable of paying the claims without bankruptcy protection.
Also know as the Texas two-step. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_two-step_bankruptcy
No, that’s fraud. This is a way to use bankruptcy to pay out claims versus reduce them—the parent company guarantees the subsidiary’s liabilities.
The amount of asbestos actually found in the powder was ridiculously low.
The only smoking gun was some internal emails where executives had some higher than baseline internal tests and they argued about the accuracy/reliability of them.
Based on everything I have read, I would not be concerned in the slightest about using Talc powder.
Asbestos was bad, but people have been conditioned to overrate it's danger to casual exposure because of the lifelong exposure to mesothelioma litigation where lawyers had a field day.
Have you seen anything newer that resoundingly disputes this and the studies cited herein?
More recent, and accounting for more recent studies: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S209379112...
Secondly, this only establishes a correlation (and a relatively weak one at that). But there are lots of other plausible links between choosing to work in a low income asbestos industry and ovarian cancer.
I'm not saying J&J did nothing wrong, but if you read the documents their testing scheme actually far exceeded the federal requirements and they regularly changed suppliers if they felt there was a risk of asbestos. Them throwing out outlier test data is only suspicious with the post-hoc assumption they were guilty of hiding something.
Certain other medical products imposed on the population raise similar concerns…
Talc is a rock. Rocks co-mingle with many minerals. As a rockhound, this is super evident. Tiger's eye is basically sealed in Asbestos. If you cut it with a tile saw you'll get very unhealthy tiny knives in your cells.
Rock powders are generally very harmful for people. Tile/countertop cutters get sick after working about 5-10 years, and that's with PPE.
It's basically a complex carbohydrate. It's not inert, bacteria can feed on it. It tends to clump when wet. Seems like the exact opposite of what you'd want to put on potentially sweaty parts.
Talc is fantastic - it's basically an inert mineral. It can get wet, and it's still talc. Bacteria can't feed on it.
I wouldn't just lump all "rock powders" together in terms of risk. Asbestos is risky because of it's physical form and iron content. Other minerals don't have the same risk.
I would avoid inhaling any powders in general - whether rock powder or not.
> Tile/countertop cutters get sick after working about 5-10 years, and that's with PPE.
I am not sure that is really true. There may be PPE involved but its either not being used properly or they are not capturing the dust properly.
What does exist: extremely sympathetic cancer patients that used talc, a faceless multinational corporation as defendant, a few documents in what was a huge amount of discovery that suggest disagreement over quality controls approaches and confidence in results, a bunch of plaintiff's attorneys on contingency-fees.
Add in a significant dose of innuendo and hand-waving and you're eventually going to find a jury that'll give you a billion dollar verdict, and so it happened.
They've known about this issue for a long, long time and decided to just change who they sell it to from wealthy, "discerning" people to groups of lower socioeconomic status. This will be a tarnish on J&J's reputation for a very long time.
Talc is used extensively in low-mid fire clay bodies as well as an additive to increase plasticity (makes clay easier to work with), and is an excellent source of MgO for fluxing glazes. In short, it's a great material to have in our cabinet [1]. But now there are essentially no more talc sources in the US and the ripple effect seen in our suppliers and manufactures has been a big shock (we are ever at the mercy of big industry!).
But I honestly just don't get the link to ovarian cancer. Chronic exposure to asbestos causing lung cancer, sure, if it were present in talc in high amounts (which is somewhat dubious in the case of talcum powder). Ultimately I have to conclude that J&J, with all of its billions of dollars and army of lawyers, couldn't find a way out of this. So either the research is dated and needs to be reviewed because there is something going on with talc that we don't understand (unlikely, imho), or I'm left speculating that there is something else motivating them to avoid closer scrutiny of their products.
- [1]: https://digitalfire.com/material/talc
This isn’t plutonium we’re talking about.
As I understand it, J&J executives moved to bury data rather than investigating. In addition, J&J specifically targeted minorities proclaiming dubious "benefits" at the same time they were burying anything to the contrary.
Consequently, it doesn't really matter whether there is or isn't a link. The optics are so terrible that J&J is going to lose badly if brought to trial.
This is the whole "silicone breast implants" thing all over. In the end, the silicone implants were not at fault, but the behavior of the responsible company was sufficiently reprehensible that they were going to lose no matter what.
This wasn't about avoiding swamp-ass from working in the hot sun even if my feet concur with you about the effectiveness of talc and the uselessness of cornstarch.
Well, it doesn't matter. It's gone for everyone and every use case now.
J&J has left the business, but there are other companies. You probably can’t buy it at the corner store anymore, but it’s available online. I just looked on Amazon and 1 lb is $23.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
What does that mean and what does it signify? Do you know enough about cancer, microbiology, the female reproductive system, etc. that you would 'get' it and that you trust your intuition?
I don't 'get' much of advanced mathematics, but that doesn't at all invalidate it in my mind, or represent evidence to others.
Is your post more than, 'I kinda wish I didn't know the facts here' - a human reaction to bad news.
Your body has no way to expel fine asbestos fibers, and so they collect in your lungs and shred up the insides. When your body tries to respond by healing, it instead forms growths that constantly re-cut and heal themselves. So it's a type of cancer, but it's unique in that it's not based on malformed DNA.
So the idea that just being in the presence of asbestos is enough to form self-propagating cancers like it's some sort of radioactive isotope... doesn't make any sense. Asbestos on it's own is completely inert.
It's an improbably claim that requires extraordinary evidence.
I spent an hour reading about that cancer. It seems that mesotheliomas without previous known asbestos exposure do occur.
It doesn't make sense to you and therefore is worth exploring. At the same time, unless one is an expert then the fact that they don't understand isn't much evidence that it's untrue.
Most people don't understand much about my field of expertise; their lack of knowledge doesn't invalidate most of my field.
When a patient who has had a pleurodesis gets an FDG PETCT, they will have intense accumulation of radiotracer for years. It is very inflammatory. Even more so than asbestos.
I wouldn’t want talc anywhere inside my reproductive tract or anywhere inside my body if I could avoid it.
If you buy the chronic inflammation leads to cancer hypothesis, talc leading to cancer is not so far fetched.
Location matters. The immune system reacts differently to foreign bodies depending on what tissue is in contact with it.
Damn near anything you add to the plural space is going to send your immune system into overdrive - the cells that line the plural cavity (mesothelial cells) are programmed to respond a certain way to their environment.
Contrast that with the cell that line your respiratory tract. There are cells that produce mucus, cells with cilia that sweep the mucus away from the lungs. They don't respond with a massive inflammatory reaction to foreign substances like the plural space does (at least not in a healthy human - asthma patients are different).
Same with the reproductive tract, especially the female one. We can insert IUDs into the uterine cavity without a massive inflammatory response.
Talc introduced into the peritoneum is similarly inflammatory and has been known since at least 1943:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/26104...
Work has been done to demonstrate that talc can migrate from external perineal application into the female reproductive tract.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6779257/
"The authors declare the following competing financial interest(s): J.J.G., W.R.W., and D.W.C. have served as consultants and provided expert testimony in talc and other environmental litigation."
Ok, well good to set the context here.
But lets look at the results of the controls (no talc exposure) where the conclusions are remarkably cryptic, but I think we can figure it out!
The paper looked at tissue samples from ovarian cancer patients - a group of six who reported decades of talc use on their bottom and six who said they didn't use talc.
They used two techniques - polarizing light microscopy (very simple technique to look for polarizing molecules like talc) and then SEM/EDX which uses an electron beam and then measures x-rays emitted to identify exactly what the particles are.
"Polarizing light microscopy, as shown in the table, revealed a range of two to 17 birefringent particles per slide; these values are comparable to the lower end of the polarizing light microscopy results of the exposed patient"
Conclusion: using the same initial technique, we actually see the same particles (suspected talc) in the controls, but "at the lower end of the range for exposed patients". Very vague, but we can conclude they saw suspected talc in the unexposed patients but on the lower end of the range for the exposed. But that means the two groups overlapped in suspected talc particles.
Well, we better confirm those results with another analytical technique to confirm it's talc, right?
"Correlative SEM/EDX of the control tissue blocks showed a total of four talc particles across all patients: two in patient 2 (right ovary) and two in patient 3 (right fallopian tube). Of note, in Supplementary Table 1, both these patients had pelvic surgery more than 30 years prior to their ovarian cancer surgical procedure."
Oh crap! Those are talc particles in the tissue in the people not exposed to talc. Where did it come from? Oh, but it's probably the surgery they underwent prior!
Which on the surface makes sense - gloves, instruments, gauze, needles might have talc particles on them. Hell, all these tissue samples were removed and then handles by a lab as well - a ton of more exposure to talc is possible! In both the test and control subjects.
But anyways, yeah, it was introduced during surgery, that explains why we see talc in the non-exposed controls. But wait!
"Among the five patients in the main study, two had a history of tubal ligation"
Oh man! The patients that did use talc had surgery too! But the article doesn't call out the contradiction - if the reason for the talc in the controls is surgery, and your test subjects also had surgery, then you should find talc too! They just call out the surgery in an attempt to claim that with a tubal ligation, talc should be blocked from moving up the fallopian tubes. They don't even realize they contradicted their own results.
Jesus Christ this is a terrible, terrible paper. Written up and published for the sole purpose of trial lawyers - the authors had made plenty of money testifying to that fact.
Then on top, they do a bunch of hand wavy stuff to explain away the talc in the samples of the non-exposed, but don't realize at the same time they are explaining away the results in the people exposed too.
Pure garbage.
They did address this and noted that in patients with tubal ligation the talc distribution was different and lymphatic rather than “mechanical” through the fallopian tubes.
Still not sure what your angle is here.
It’s known that talc is inflammatory. It’s literally used with that intention medically. We don’t use powdered latex gloves in the modern day nearly as frequently as before, mostly because of latex allergy but also due to concerns that talc exposure leads to worse peritoneal scarring/adhesions.
The fact that talc is present inside the surgical specimens is bad in and of itself, regardless of how it got there. That implies an environmental cause for the malignancy, a la asbestos or smoking.
This is absolutely incorrect.
Several genes are commonly mutated in mesothelioma, and may be prognostic factors. These include primarily BAP1, NF2, and TP53;[63] epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) and C-Met, receptor tyrosine kinases can also be altered and overexpressed in many mesotheliomas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesothelioma#Pathophysiology
The specific cancers that fit directly into the category you are carving out for mesothelioma are squamous and adénocarcinomas of the oesophagus, gastric mucosa and large bowel; lung cancers and other cancers of the epithelium.
The basic pathological process underlying cancer is cell dysplasia (usually caused by irritation/prolonged inflammation) which leads to metaplasia. Whether this is driven by a de novo mutation in that cell or from an external source is totally irrelevant and mesothelioma is certainly not unique in how it comes to fuck you up
The last time I looked, it was being sold as though it was a controlled substance alongside laboratory grade ethanol, etc.
On the one hand, baby powder causes ovarian cancer (there is evidence that this is true for talc that is not contaminated with asbestos, despite J&J’s long disinformation campaigns).
On the other, if you want to use it in an application where it is perfectly safe, it’s essentially impossible to buy an appropriate product.
"riddled with asbestos"
"introducing a whole bunch of asbestos [while using baby powder]"
"[asbestos is] known for causing [cancer] for decades" (this is implicitly referring to inhalation - the link to ovarian cancer via genital contact is way, way less solid, isn't it?)
- is amoral
- is required and heavily incentivized by shareholders to maximize business value/output/growth at all costs
- is lead by people who cannot be held responsible for bad behavior (prison time)
You have to expect the worst. You have to assume they are going to do the absolute worst behavior they can get away with, that they will operate up to a millimeter away from the law, and sometimes go over the line if they think they can. The entire system is set up such that they would be foolish not to. IMO we should presume guilt instead of innocence when it comes to corporations--there is no reason to think they would voluntarily uphold some ethical or moral code if it meant lower profits.
2. They're a publicly traded company. Shareholders are we.
3. This sounds like the "if you're not religious, what's stopping you from killing people all the time?" logic
Furthermore, the extremely politicized nature of the vaccine development process[0] constrains corporate misbehavior. In other words, the CEOs knew they had eyes on themselves and had to restrain themselves. Corporate misbehavior is far more likely when the public stops caring and corporations can start capturing regulatory agencies. In other words, their evil is very boring. "Company invents new vaccine that kills people" is an unusually sexy kind of evil, which means it gets unusually scrutinized. "Company neglects higher-than-average asbestos in talcum powder" is so boring nobody cares even after they get nasty cancer.
[0] Which, oddly enough, resulted in Trump getting booed for taking credit for the vaccine he funded.
[1] As far as I'm aware, these risks have not borne out into increased harm from the vaccines. I feel like there would have been a conservative media shitstorm if it had.
But in this case weren't the makers actually indemnified? Here's a CNBC article from 2020 called "You can’t sue Pfizer or Moderna if you have severe Covid vaccine side effects. The government likely won’t compensate you for damages." https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/16/covid-vaccine-side-effects-c...
Side note you mentioned you took "all" the vaccines but if you haven't gotten a dose since at least mid-Sept 2023, you are recommended to get another one: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/stay-up-t...
Many people took them and were fine, but that doesn’t mean all people who took them were fine.[1]
0 - https://www.cureus.com/articles/196275-increased-age-adjuste...
1 - https://abcnews.go.com/amp/GMA/Food/panera-bread-issues-new-...
These old companies were founded in a society that had clear values, and many of those companies reflect those values. Even modern companies frequently have moral values, for instance, Zappos. As a society, though, we have jettisoned those old, constraining Christian/Protestant values, and the prevailing value, to the extent I can identify it, is a Marxist, everything is just the use power to oppress. If we take that as our value system, then that is what we'll become. So if you don't like companies living out that value, then it behooves you to promote the kind of values that benefit society and bring people together.
[1] https://www.jnj.com/our-credo
However, it doesn't sound like anyone has actually done any testing like this.
Even assuming that there was indeed a microscopic amount of asbestos in talc, you should be aware that you're breathing in probably ~5,000 asbestos fibers every day - that's about the ambient level from naturally occurring asbestos in air. If you do yard work, or you drive off-road, then you're probably getting more than that.
Isn't this just abusing the system?
What J&J tried to do was fund the subsidiary with however much they thought they'd be liable for and treat claimants as creditors to the bankrupt subsidiary. Bankruptcy law is designed to deal fairly with all creditors. The alternative is that a couple of gigantic judgments against J&J right at the beginning would leave no money for people who sued later.
The courts rejected this approach, not because of unfairness specifically, but because J&J had provided funding to the subsidiary. If the subsidiary has money, it can't be bankrupt yet.
If the subsidiary ultimately pays all claims to everyone who is entitled (a big if), it isn't necessarily wrong. [1] The one downside is claimants can't go after all of J&J's assets in the event of a huge victory.
I'm recounting all this from columns I read while back, so someone please correct me if I got details wrong.
1. https://www.investopedia.com/texas-two-step-bankruptcy-defin...
>"So you might want to file for bankruptcy to pay off all your victims fairly and, perhaps, cheaply, even if their claims will not really “bankrupt” you in the traditional sense. But in fact that is kind of a drastic step, expensive and disruptive and risky and probably bad for shareholders. No chief executive officer of a big company wants to file for bankruptcy if it is not strictly necessary.
> There is a neater approach:
> -You put the liabilities in a box. You create a new subsidiary, you put the product-that-kills-people business in that subsidiary, and you transfer the liabilities related to that product to the subsidiary. This is, in general, hard to do, but in fact Texas has a weird merger law that allows it: You can “merge” your company into two companies, one with the liabilities and one with the rest of the business.
> -You have the box — the new subsidiary with all the product liabilities — file for bankruptcy. You get fair and consistent adjudication of the product claims, inside the box, and the rest of the company just goes along relatively normally.
> This is called the “Texas two-step.” In its extreme form it sounds like very bad cheating: You can’t really put all the liabilities and none of the money in the box; that is just a way to defraud victims, and surely they’d find a way to do something about it. But a milder form of the Texas Two-Step is that you put the liabilities in the box, put the box in bankruptcy, but have the parent company guarantee its product liabilities. (Perhaps up to some reasonable number, perhaps not.) Then you can say “no, we are not doing this to get out of paying our liabilities; we are doing it to pay them in a fairer and more consistent way.”
Like when you're paying taxes, an accountant using every possible tactic they can to reduce your tax burden is simply good accounting.
I assume part of the answer is some ratio of corporate assets or revenue, as well as how the fines are implemented.
Mesothelioma is one thing. One of the drivers of malignant mesothelioma (which is caused by inhalation of asbestos) is a chronic state of inflammation caused by the inability to remove or degrade the asbestos fibers.
But in ovarian cancer the major mechanisms are not inflammatory in nature. Depending on the type (there are a few), usually it's a mutation in a key gene that then causes other, larger alterations in the chromosomes and ultimately a malignant outcome.
Now, mutations can be caused by inflammation (in particular due to the release of reactive oxygen species or ROS), but as fa as I'm aware, mechanisms of asbestos-like chronic inflammation being a cause (not a link, a cause, I mean with a molecular explanation) are not widely reported in literature and I haven't heard anything like that from my peers (much more knowledgeable than me on the topic).