Greg Bernhardt said:
Then why did they hide it for 40 years?
Even if there is no difference in terms of health risk, there is a big difference in terms of marketing and liability between "sometimes contains trace amounts of asbestos" and "conatains no asbestos".
There's a bottled water or filtration commercial out right now where they do a taste test where the facilitator introduces a sample by saying something like "this water contains an amount of lead considered acceptable by federal standards" [paraphrase], and the response by the subjects is predictably negative.
The J&J responses cited in the article appear to me to be excuse-making, for the purpose of keeping the floodgates closed and I frankly neither believe them nor blame them. Juries are not savvy enough and lawyers are malicious enough to turn almost nothing into tens of billions of dollars of liability.
The talc/ovarian cancer link doesn't pass the smell test to me for a couple of reasons:
1. The link was first attempted without asbestos link, indicating to me that it is predatory litigation.
2. I don't see an easy means of exposure.
More on the second one: Shipyard workers wrapping insulation around pipes in poorly ventilated metal boxes (pieces of ships) inhaled asbestos directly into their lungs, from clouds they created while working. That's an obvious exposure path. Not to be too graphic, but it strikes me as very difficult for talc/asbestos to find a way into a woman's ovaries even if applied topically and then a tampon is inserted. And that's assuming there is more than a trace amount of asbestos in the talc -- for the shipyard workers, it's all asbestos and it was being pulled directly into their lungs.
It should not be surprising then that the evidence for asbestos causing mesothelioma is extremely strong and the evidence for asbestos or talc causing cervical cancer is extremely weak.
The article itself is very thin on relevant data and very heavy on emotion-stroking. About the only piece of any relevance is this:
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.”
That's 47 years ago and it's still very vague. What are the actual concentrations measured in what fraction of samples? I don't know if there is a mechanism for this, but IMO, the FDA should step in, conduct an investigation and either shut down production of talc or shut down the lawsuits.
This is promising moving forward, but doesn't inform to past risk and current cancers:
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.