Johnson & Johnson - a family company
You have to read the entire thing to see how Johnson & Johnson has lied repeatedly, made sure research was buried or not done, manipulated data to serve their own ends, and worked repeatedly to not do the right thing.
Angry reacts only.
This is going to be a mess…othelioma!
Asbestos killed my step-father, so my tolerance for companies that hid it is somewhere less than zero.
They knew since the god damned 70s. May they all burn.
To be technical, they knew even earlier than that.
Ohhhhhhhh fuck, I just heard the documents they got showed from the 70s. May they burn even hotter.
“A family company” is the slogan of SC Johnson, not Johnson & Johnson, I believe.
I didn’t realize they were different?
They are.
Johnson & Johnson includes:
McNeil Consumer Healthcare (Tylenol, Motrin, Benadryl, Listerine, etc.)
Vistakon (Acuvue lenses)
Nutrogena (various skin & hair care products)
Depuy (joint replacements)
Wow, so they knew it was dangerous side the 70s and decided not to change it for FIFTY years?
That’s nuts.
It’s typical :(
Que libertarian jerks who say, “the market will regulate itself”.
On the scale of corporate malfeasance to tort-lawyer overreach, I see this as leaning to tort-lawyer overreach. Talc is talc, and for as long as it has existed its had some asbestos-like fiber impurities in it. Until I see some evidence that J+J talc is actually particularly harmful I don’t want people getting $100 million settlements because they used a product that millions of people used, with no evidence that the product causes their health problem.
I agree about the dollar amounts. That being said, the research J&J paid for was substandard designed to specifically fit the results they wanted. If they had no fear of the amount of asbestos in baby powder and it being totally inert to the lungs, then I guess they shouldn’t have needed to manipulate results and testing methodology?
See, you’ve got to look at it as a whole. If you’re going to act like a guilty party then…
From a scientific, geological standpoint the amount of asbestos related fibers in talc is going to vary tremendously in a dig site. While you may have most zones where it is 1% or less, you will have some areas where it will be significantly higher. With this natural variance and risks it provides, shouldn’t the consumer have the choice to decide if they want to shoulder that risk? Do you want to be the one person who gets the bottle of baby powder loaded with a 15% concentration of asbestos and use that on your baby exposing her to that?
Do you think people should be informed of its contents so they can make that decision for themselves? I have severely compromised lungs and didn’t learn about asbestos being a small percentage of talc until a few years ago. I need to limit any kind of respiratory risk, so I certainly would have stopped using baby powder even if the risk was infinitesimal.
I personally think the fact that there have been uterine cancers with the fibers of asbestos present from daily baby powder use is pretty damning.
Whoa, was this a thing?
I find that percentage pretty hard to believe, but i haven’t read through all the paperwork.
From what i heard, we were talking about trace amounts of asbestos at worst. Was it really as high as 15%?
Hiding damaging information from regulators is clearly corporate malfeasance, and there is no amount of “tort-lawyer overreach” possible in such a circumstance. I should think the evidence that their product caused harm is the existence of the mesothelioma itself, in the absence of other potential asbestos exposure vectors.
15% is not listed in the article, I’m talking about on a normal dig site, the variance. Since J&J has no technique for separating them out, does substandard testing, hides results they don’t like, we literally have no idea.
If I read it right most of our talc comes from China now. No way do I trust Chinese miners or their safety standards to not dig into the contact zone between talc and the surrounding schist where asbestos fiber concentrations leap.
Well, i think that currently, they actually test the talc. I don’t think anyone is suggesting that modem talc has asbestos in it.
I mean they tested it back then, too, at least a tiny percentage of it. That’s the only way we know what they did. They tested it and hid the results.
They do test the talc, but it’s an exceedingly tiny amount as one would expect since the only effective way to check is some form of manual microscopy. It’s a laborious and slow process. So the end result is we really don’t know how much is in there for a multitude of factors.
But I’d like to go back to the uterine cancer cases. These women are not wearing asbestos underwear. The only logical conclusion is to draw a direct line to baby powder use with the clinical and pathological findings (unless there’s something odd going on in the production of tampons). This deserves extensive and careful study. J&J would just rather it all go away, not tell anyone there could be risks, and let those who suffer be ignored.