Louis jury awards $72M in Johnson & Johnson cancer suit

A St. Louis family was awarded $72 million dollars in a lawsuit for a mother who died of ovarian cancer.

The verdict in favor of Jacqueline Fox was for $10 million in actual damages and $62 million in punitive damages.

The civil suit, filed by Jackie Fox, was part of a broader Missouri claim involving nearly 60 people. So far, Johnson & Johnson faces almost 1,200 lawsuits from customers who feel they were not warned against the possible risks of using the talcum.

The verdict sends a “tremendous signal to J&J and all of the cosmetic companies”, said Jere Beasley, one of the Fox lawyers. Despite the danger, the studies remained relatively unknown – they didn’t prove causation, just correlation – and other than their publication in a few medical journals the public at large remained largely unaware of the risk.

In an interview with FairWarning, Fox’s son, Marvin Salter, said, “Obviously, the final outcome is something that my mother wanted”.

The verdict is the first by a USA jury to award damages over the claims, the lawyers said. “We sympathize with the plaintiff’s family but firmly believe the safety of cosmetic talc is supported by decades of scientific evidence”. “All they had to do was put a warning label on”.

“To think how groundbreaking this could be for so many other women”, he told the newspaper. The disease strikes about one woman in 70. “For example, the more you smoke, the higher your risk of lung cancer”.

However, Johnson & Johnson attorney Gene Williams said the “best and most recent” studies showed no connection between talc use and ovarian cancer, an earlier Bloomberg article reported.

Valeant Pharmaceuticals International Inc now owns the Shower to Shower brand but was not a defendant in the Fox case. She had used the talc-based products for more than 35 years. Plaintiff lawyers, heartened by a liability finding in arch-conservative South Dakota, began churning out the current wave of ovarian cancer claims.

Talc is used in products as varied as wallboard and the powder that keeps elastic balloons from sticking together. In 1971, British researchers analyzed 13 ovarian tumors under a microscope and found talc particles “deeply embedded” in 10. “But the majority of the studies have not found a similar relationship for talc use and ovarian cancer”. “For any individual woman, if there is an increased risk, the overall increase is likely to be very small”, the American Cancer Society’s website notes.

J&J, which introduced a baby powder using cornstarch in the 1970s, continues to offer products that include talc and maintains the substance is safe. He pointed to one document in 1997 where a paid consultant had warned the company about what studies were showing.