B. Braun lawsuits sit in various stages
More than 100 were filed claiming company’s emissions led to cancer
The first of more than 100 lawsuits against B. Braun, an international medical company with a commercial sterilizer facility in Hanover Township, Lehigh County was filed in May 2021, accusing the company of emitting a toxic chemical that caused their cancer.
Two years later, around a third of total cases have been withdrawn but more have been filed as recently as last month. Some are tentatively scheduled to go to trial or reach a settlement as soon as next year.
It’s common for cases of this magnitude to stretch on for years, with dozens of plaintiffs and multiple law firms involved. At least some of the cases against B. Braun have also been delayed by internal strife within one of the lead law firms suing the company.
Most of the ongoing cases are still in the “pre-trial discovery” stage, which means the two parties are exchanging information on the evidence that will be presented in court.
Several of the older cases have tentative dates scheduled for either trials or settlement conferences in 2024 or 2025. According to their websites, several law firms, including Kline & Specter, Bosworth Law and The Town Law LLC, are still taking on new clients, meaning more cases could be filed in coming months.
One prominent law firm has claimed in a new filing to have evidence of “systematic underreporting” of B. Braun’s ethylene oxide emissions.
Why is B. Braun being sued?
Lawyers representing cancer patients and their families argue that B. Braun’s emissions of a colorless, odorless gas called ethylene oxide caused their cancers. B. Braun uses the chemical at its Hanover Township facility to sterilize equipment.
At least 33 cases of the more than 100 lawsuits filed in the last two years have been withdrawn, while around 69 are ongoing, including several new cases that have been filed this year.
The “lead case” in Kline & Specter’s 33 consolidated cases was filed on behalf of Macungie resident Katira Noska, who previously worked and lived near the Hanover Township plant and developed thyroid cancer at age 34, according to a court filing.
The civil action suit alleges that B. Braun’s “excessive and dangerous” ethylene oxide emissions caused Noska and other plaintiffs cancer. It alleges, citing EPA data, that people living near B. Braun have a cancer risk that is 200 times higher than that of the average Pennsylvania resident. The cases claim “harm and tortious injury” and demands unspecified punitive damages for counts including negligence, strict liability, public nuisance, private nuisance, fraud, fraudulent concealment, negligent misrepresentation, civil conspiracy and violation of the Pennsylvania constitution.
Kline & Specter, the firm representing 33 plaintiffs in active cases, presented in a court filing last month what it calls evidence that B. Braun intentionally and repeatedly underreported its emissions.
B. Braun has admitted no wrongdoing and said it will “vigorously” fight the suits.
At least five law firms are representing plaintiffs suing B. Braun, but the majority are represented by two firms: Kline & Specter and Bosworth Law, which is led by a former Kline & Specter
attorney who launched an independent firm and is embroiled in an ongoing legal dispute with his former employer.
A separate, class action lawsuit, filed by Chicago firm Edelson on behalf of 24,000 people in the Hanover Township area identified by the EPA as having an elevated lifetime cancer risk, is also continuing to seek plaintiffs to join their suit. “A representative from the firm did not respond to a request for comment.
Internal disputes
In an offshoot to the B. Braun case, Kline & Specter sued former associate comment=” “Thomas Bosworth last year, alleging that he poached clients and deceived the firm about his plan to launch his own firm. The lawsuit came several months after the firm fired Bosworth, claiming that he mismanaged his caseload and made misrepresentations in court and to other firm lawyers.
According to legal documents, Bosworth’s firm represents about 43 cases against B. Braun, while Kline & Specter lawyers represent around 46, including cases that have since been withdrawn.
Bosworth, who did not respond to an emailed request for comment, denied the allegations to Law.com, and said his former employer saw him as a “threat” because “a large number of clients chose me as their attorney rather than be represented by Kline & Specter.”
Shanin Specter, an attorney with Kline & Specter, declined to comment on the Bosworth lawsuit.
Yet that legal dispute factored into a motion for sanctions B. Braun filed against Kline & Specter in May, seeking to recoup the legal costs the company spent defending 33 lawsuits that were later voluntarily withdrawn.
B. Braun argued that those 33 lawsuits were “meritless” and argued Kline & Specter’s “unprofessional, bad faith and vexatious conduct” has “needlessly” increased B. Braun’s cost and wasted the company’s time. Kline & Specter’s suit against Bosworth, B. Braun lawyers argued, provides evidence of “misconduct” while Bosworth worked at the firm.
B. Braun spokesperson Allison Longenhagen said the company filed the motion for sanctions “after much careful thought and deliberation.”
But Kline & Specter, in a separate, 400-page June legal filing, said B. Braun is “trying to exploit an irrelevant lawsuit” via the motion for sanctions, and called the filing “procedurally improper” and a “frivolous” “litigation sideshow.”
Underreporting allegations
Kline & Specter’s newest filing also includes allegations and evidence of what the firm calls B. Braun’s “systematic underreporting” of ethylene oxide emissions.
According to the EPA, the Hanover Township facility emitted between 1,900 and 7,600 pounds of the harmful chemical per year between 2008 and 2018.
B. Braun has since cut its emissions by around 90%, emitting just 485 pounds in 2022.
But according to Kline & Specter’s most recent filing, those numbers could be undercounting the true volume of harmful emissions from the plant.
The filing includes internal B. Braun documents that detail how the company has handled ethylene oxide emissions and safety training all the way back to 1984.
Additionally, Kline & Specter’s filings claims B. Braun used an overly confident estimate of its emissions abatement equipment to calculate their emissions, which they say could have caused a “massive” undercounting of B. Braun’s true emissions level.
B. Braun calculated its emissions assuming its abatement equipment operated at 99% efficiency, even though testing of the equipment never confirmed this. In a report from the EPA, the agency identifies this unverified statistic as an “area of concern.”
Another way B. Braun’s emissions have allegedly been undercounted, according to Kline & Specter’s filing, is that B. Braun never measured or accounted for possible EtO emissions from the transfer of pallets from Hanover Township to another B. Braun facility in Breinigsville.
Further, the law firm also alleges B. Braun never reported a “potentially massive” amount of EtO emissions from a programming glitch with its sterilizers in 2010.
“This strengthens the conclusion that [ethylene oxide] has caused Lehigh Valleyians to develop blood and breast cancers, and beyond the litigation itself, it raises significant issues concerning the potential for additional Lehigh Valleyians to be diagnosed with cancer,” Specter said in an interview.
The law firm has submitted its findings to the Environmental Protection Agency and the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. Spokespersons for both agencies declined to comment.
In a statement, B. Braun’s Longenhagen said Kline & Specter’s allegations are “completely without merit.” The statement did not directly address Kline & Specter’s findings but said the facility is not on the EPA’s list of facilities with an elevated risk of exposure to the chemical .
Longenhagen also pointed to a 2022 analysis from the Pennsylvania Department of Health, which looked at rates of cancer near the B. Braun facility and found that people living nearby are at no higher risk to develop cancer related to EtO exposure than people in other areas of Pennsylvania.
“There is no consistent pattern of cancer incidence rates among adults or children living within a 2-mile radius of the B. Braun facility relative to adults and children living outside the 2-mile radius,” the study concludes.