Baby powder papers reflect firm’s internal asbestos concerns

In the early 1970s, a Johnson & Johnson official posed a question that haunts the company today. If Johnson’s Baby Powder contained asbestos at a level of, say, 1 percent, how much of the cancer-causing substance would a baby inhale when dusted with the powder?

The executive’s handwritten memo reached what, at the time, may have seemed a comforting conclusion: The baby’s exposure would be far less than the legal limit for an asbestos miner, the main standard then in place.

But the memo and other internal company records cast doubt on J&J’s assertions that its powders have always been asbestos-free. If they never contained the carcinogen, why then did officials bother to estimate the potential exposure for a baby?

Drawn from a trove of about 175,000 pages of J&J documents, the revealing memos have helped to fuel a new spurt of litigation against the pharmaceutical and consumer products giant. The lawsuits are by victims of mesothelioma, a rare and lethal form of asbestos-related cancer that typically strikes decades after initial exposure. At issue is whether talc powders were contaminated by traces of asbestos, and whether, after years of routinely sprinkling on the powders, plaintiffs unwittingly inhaled enough of the microscopic fibers to contract the deadly illness.

Fair Warning reviewed thousands of pages of documents in preparing this story, including internal company memos and transcripts of legal proceedings as well as material obtained under the Freedom of Information Act; almost none of this material has been previously reported.

The intriguing documents don’t settle the safety issue. But they raise questions about J&J’s candor on the incendiary topic of asbestos and talc.

J&J, which declined interview requests, has said its powders are perfectly safe, and could not have caused mesothelioma.

In November, the company won a big victory in its first mesothelioma trial, when a Los Angeles Superior Court jury found J&J and co-defendant Imerys Talc America were not responsible for the mesothelioma of Tina Herford, 61. Herford, of Camarillo, said she had used the company’s talc powders for about 35 years. It settled a second case, and faces at least several dozen more lawsuits. Similar lawsuits are targeting other companies, including Colgate Palmolive, which formerly produced Cashmere Bouquet powder.

Opening arguments are set for January 22 in the next trial against J&J and a group of talc suppliers, this one in Middlesex County Superior Court in New Brunswick, N.J. The suit contends that Stephen Lanzo III, from the time of his birth in 1972, frequently used asbestos-contaminated powder, causing him to contract mesothelioma.

In contrast to their public assurances, J&J officials seemed to privately acknowledge at times that they had an asbestos problem, the documents show. They tried to persuade federal regulators that no one would be harmed if talc powder had up to 1 percent asbestos. Moreover, J&J and its industry allies successfully lobbied for a test protocol — still on the books today — that is too crude to detect trace amounts of the carcinogen in talc powders and cosmetics.

Talc, the softest known mineral, has a wide range of uses in cosmetic, pharmaceutical and food products, but talc deposits are sometimes interlaced with small amounts of asbestos.

The documents echo an asbestos scare that rocked the cosmetics industry in the 1970s. The uproar began when researchers at New York University and Mount Sinai Hospital separately reported finding asbestos in a number of popular talc-based powders and cosmetics. For makers of such up close and personal products, no stigma could be worse; for J&J, the bombshell findings were a threat to its wholesome image and to an iconic product that a company memo called “the cornerstone of our baby products franchise.”

It turned out that the reports of contamination were somewhat exaggerated. At the time, analytical methods for detecting low levels of asbestos in talc were evolving — sometimes yielding false negatives or false positives. Other labs could not confirm certain of the results, and the NYU and Mount Sinai researchers wound up retracting some of their positive findings.