J&J’s talc problem persists: Johnson & Johnson ordered to pay $40 million in case of baby powder cancer – The Times of India

A California jury on Friday ordered Johnson & Johnson to pay $40 million to two women who said decades of use of the company’s talc-based baby powder led to ovarian cancer.Kent was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2014 and Schultz in 2018. Both California residents said they used J&J’s baby powder after 40 years of bathing. Their treatments included major surgeries and dozens of rounds of chemotherapy, they testified at the trial, Reuters reported.In his closing arguments, watched on Courtroom View Network, Andy Birchfield, a lawyer for the women, told the jury: “They absolutely knew, they knew and they did everything they could to cover it up, to bury the truth about the dangers.”Allison Brown, an attorney for Johnson & Johnson, said, “They don’t have the evidence in this case and they hope you don’t mind.” She argued that no major U.S. health authorities support the alleged link and that no research shows that talc can migrate from the outside of the body to the reproductive organs.Erik Haas, Johnson & Johnson’s global vice president of litigation, said in a statement that the company plans to “immediately appeal this judgment and expects it to prevail, as we typically do in dissenting adverse rulings.”Johnson & Johnson is facing lawsuits from more than 67,000 plaintiffs who say they were diagnosed with cancer after using baby powder and other talc products, court documents show. The company says its products are safe, do not contain asbestos and do not cause cancer. J&J stopped selling talc-based baby powder in the U.S. in 2020 and switched to a cornstarch product.J&J has tried to resolve the lawsuit through bankruptcy, a proposal rejected three times by federal courts, most recently in April. Most cases had been put on hold due to the bankruptcies. Brown and Kent’s cases are the first to go to trial since the last Chapter 11 attempt was dismissed.Before its bankruptcy attempts, J&J had a mixed record in talc investigations, with verdicts of as much as $4.69 billion awarded to women who claimed baby powder caused their ovarian cancer. The company has won a number of lawsuits outright and other verdicts have been reduced on appeal.Most lawsuits involve ovarian cancer claims. Cases alleging that talc caused the rare and deadly cancer called mesothelioma make up a smaller portion of the claims J&J faces. The company has already settled some of these claims, but has not yet reached a nationwide settlement. That’s why many mesothelioma lawsuits have been filed in state courts in recent months. In the past year, J&J has been hit with several substantial verdicts in mesothelioma cases, including a more than $900 million verdict in Los Angeles in October.