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Comment by erulabs | Hacker News Reader

Neutrogena is owned by Johnson and Johnson - which just payed out on a case relating to cancer from baby-powders [1]. Combined with Neutrogena being more or less _very high_ in benezine content and J&J having a very deep suite of cancer treatment drugs [2]... This seems like a horrific story of a self-fulfilling product pipeline. I know they're a giant organization and suggesting conspiracy is a bit insane but I can't help but think I'll be avoiding J&J and all their subsidiary brands actively from here on out. At very least, their quality control for one of the biggest manufacturers on earth is awful.

1: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/23/health/baby-powder-cancer...

2. https://www.barrons.com/articles/johnson-johnson-stock-pipel...

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> Johnson and Johnson - which just payed out on a case relating to cancer from baby-powders

I asked this question in another post and did not get a reply.

The US links sited state no evidence for talc causing cancer. A search of the NHS website also suggests no clear evidence [1]. Cancer Research (a respected UK charity) give a layman's summary (albeit focusing on ovarian cancer), stating no clear evidence and pointing out that there are far more serious risks to worry about [2].

Given the above, what is the hype about? Is this because the US is so insanely litigious?

[1] https://www.evidence.nhs.uk/search?om=[{%22ety%22:[%22Inform...

[2] https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/causes-of-canc...

EDIT: Down votes for asking a genuine question? Shame on you.

I see people started downvoting this, if you do, please explain why.

You have got to give people more than 6 minutes to respond with a counter-argument, especially if you want a thoughtful answer.

Because J&J didn't get in trouble for talc being carcinogenic. J&J got in trouble for their talc being contaminated with asbestos, which is definitely carcinogenic.

> Is this because the US is so insanely litigious?

Part of it is the weird setup of jury trials for civil cases, especially impactful in cases revolving around fairly technical, detail-oriented stuff like malpractice.

Twelve randomly selected lay people may not be the best determiners of scientific evidence and in-depth statistical analysis.

It's enough to put people to death, so it should be enough for everything else.

Twelve randomly selected lay people shouldn't get to decide to allow the State to kill people, either.

No argument here. I was just point out how trivial our systems are, and we still kill other humans based on the feelings other humans.

At least that requires unanimous decisions vs civil cases where it just has to be the majority.

The legal standard for a conviction/judgement also changes, from "beyond a reasonable doubt" in criminal to "preponderance of the evidence" in civil- i.e. 99.9% certainty becomes 51% certainty.

Every criminal case involves more than a jury. The prosecutor has to decide to bring charges, judge has to accept the case, etc. Death penalty cases are more involved. I've sat through the automatic appeals that were part of California's process.

>The US links sited state no evidence for causing cancer.

It's benzine. It's a known carcinogen, no need for empiricism here.

There are lots of known carcinogens for which the dosage is important. For example... sunlight.

There's a reason the "this product contains a chemical known to the State of California to cause cancer" warning labels are a bit of a joke, after all.

benzene is not one of those

One molecule of benzene will guarantee a cancer case?

You aren't guaranteed to die from being shot in the head either. However there are things which the medical community recognizes have no safe level of exposure.

From the original article: "The toxicity of benzene in humans has been well established for over 120 years. The hematotoxicity of benzene has been described as early as 1897. A study from 1939 on benzene stated that “exposure over a long period of time to any concentration of benzene greater than zero is not safe,” which is a comment reiterated in a 2010 review of benzene research specifically stating “There is probably no safe level of exposure to benzene, and all exposures constitute some risk in a linear, if not supralinear, and additive fashion.”

Yeah and you literally can’t breathe without risking being exposed to benzene. It’s in many adhesives, paints and petrol.

If you want to adopt a zero tolerance policy for benzene then you’d need to ban petrol. Or stop breathing.

I'm certainly not going to rub petrol on my skin.

It just takes one UV ray hit one strand of dna and lead to cancer.

The links are about talcum powder, not sunscreen. Totally separate type of product that has nothing to do with benzene.

It’s presumably not the talc but the asbestos found in the talc deposits that makes its way into the baby powder

We know that asbestos causes mesothelioma and that J&J baby powders contained asbestos since talc/asbestos are often found together in mines.

J&J knew for decades that they were shipping asbestos to consumers in a powder form that's regularly inhaled -- they ghost-wrote and sponsored studies to deny that asbestos existed in their products and lied to the FDA in their disclosures..

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/johnsona...

It seems that most talc doesn't cause cancer -- but some talc has "rather high" amounts of asbestos in it -- which we know causes cancer.

> It seems that most talc doesn't cause cancer -- but some talc has "rather high" amounts of asbestos in it -- which we know causes cancer.

So no evidence, just suspicion?

I must be blunt and say this has left me more puzzled why the US courts have ruled the way they have.

EDIT: Down votes again for asking a question? Explain yourselves. Are people defending something without evidence?

It's not uncommon, science does not hold the ultimate truth of the world, it's a complex system based on intuition and beliefs and politics. Medical responsibility is highly complex and it does not follow the same rules (thankfully). In Europe, courts have been compensating people who got multiple sclerosis induced by the Hep B vaccine for decades even though there is no evidence of a causal link.

The evidence is that there was enough asbestos in the talc to cause cancer, and multiple executives at Johnson and Johnson knew, and people who used it got cancer. I'm not sure how you could believe the people who unknowingly inhaled asbestos and rubbed it all over their babies do not have standing.

Thank you for being the first person to post an informative reply rather than down voting a question. HN is turning into reddit.

> I'm not sure how you could believe

Though this is unnecessarily insulting.

> the people who unknowingly inhaled asbestos and rubbed it all over their babies do not have standing.

If the concentration was so low as to be negligible (as the links I have posted state) then why the successful litigation? This is the question I am asking!

> The evidence is that there was enough asbestos in the talc to cause cancer,

This is the evidence I am asking for. The NHS and other respected UK bodies state differently. This seams to be a purely US issue and I am asking why.

Researchers at Johnson & Johnson detected unsafe levels of asbestos in the talc as part of their own internal testing. There are internal emails that show high level executives asking researchers to switch to a less sensitive test which would allow them to make the concentration of asbestos appear lower than it really was. I remember that when the story first dropped, the people writing J&J's press releases were very careful to use only the present tense when discussing the asbestos levels in their talcum products which implies to me that they did eventually rectify it. That's all I know. I didn't follow the story for very long.

The information in the article posted by the person you're responding to answers your questions - J&J knew their product had high levels of asbestos and hid it from regulators while doing nothing about it. There absolutely was evidence of this, if you would read any of the information posted above. If I sold you a bottle of water with enough asbestos in it to give you cancer, knew about it, and didn't tell you: that would be illegal - it is pretty straightforward.

Can't even downvote myself, but my guess is that it's related to the extremity of your position. It sounds a lot like you're saying since we know cyanide is poisonous by itself, it's very strange to be able to win a lawsuit if you find significant amounts of cyanide in your bread. Most bread is fine, right? So merely finding cyanide in it should only count as suspicion of a problem and not count as evidence... seems to be what you're saying.

That's an interesting example to choose, because almonds have a small amount of cyanide naturally. I think that highlights that quantity matters

Cyanide occurs naturally in apple cores. It is the dose that makes the poison.

The UK links I have cited say the low levels are not an issue. I've genuinely asked what evidence the US courts are using and I appear to have come up against group think. I did not expect this on HN.

I'd genuinely appreciate it if somebody can provide evidence citing the risk is other than negligible.

Asbestos -> Cancer.

Safe amount = 0.

What an inane response. Perhaps I can counter with

Alcohol -> Cancer.

Safe amount = 0.

Alcohol content of fresh bread > 0

Radiation also -> cancer. Should we ban windows that allow sun light into our lives??

This is why I specified significant amounts, but the exact details of my highly contrived example are obviously not that important.

If you phrased it the way you phased this response, I think you would have gotten a better response.

You didn't phrase it as "I have reason to believe certain levels are not a problem, and I am unaware of the levels recorded in the lawsuit. Where they high enough to be a problem?"

You instead phrased it far more absolute terms that stated that 'merely' finding a dangerous substance in a product was not evidence of it being dangerous. It absolutely is evidence. It may not be sufficient evidence on it's own, but each piece of evidence does not need to be sufficient to prove the case entirely on it's own. Your statements have also carried the extremely strong implication - and that's being generous - that the US courts were definitely wrong. I don't think anybody read your posts and thought you were requesting information and not stating a strong position in defense of J&J.

People have limited time and effort. You made it as difficult as possible to get the information you wished. I wouldn't blame this one on HN groupthink.

From the parent comment's link:

> A Reuters examination of many of those documents, as well as deposition and trial testimony, shows that from at least 1971 to the early 2000s, the company’s raw talc and finished powders sometimes tested positive for small amounts of asbestos, and that company executives, mine managers, scientists, doctors and lawyers fretted over the problem and how to address it while failing to disclose it to regulators or the public.

I think you're being downvoted for not RTFA, not for asking a question.

> sometimes tested positive for small amounts of asbestos

And the question I have asked is where is the evidence that such small quantities are a risk? The UK links I have posted suggest otherwise. This is why I am asking.

I'm puzzled... are the US courts are saying "OMG Asbestos" rather than looking at safe levels? What if the same courts said "OMG 5G" ! This is why I am asking a genuine question.

If this gets another “shame on you” edit, I’d reflect on we people are downvoting you. Fwiw, I haven’t voted on your comments either way.

If people could explain why they are down voting honest questions I would appreciate it.

I've never heard of claimed talc-cancer links in the UK.

Slant related: I've never seen anyone asking where the upvotes came from, and that makes the opposite a bit odd across the board for me.

Well for one thing downvotes make text harder to read unless selected.

Because there is no safe level of exposure to asbestos.

From the above Reuters article "The World Health Organization and other authorities recognize no safe level of exposure to asbestos. While most people exposed never develop cancer, for some, even small amounts of asbestos are enough to trigger the disease years later."

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/johnsona...

> Because there is no safe level of exposure to asbestos.

I think we are getting to the bottom of this :-)

The UK Health and Safety Executive state...

"The control limit for asbestos is 0.1 asbestos fibres per cubic centimetre of air (0.1 f/cm3). The control limit is not a 'safe' level and exposure from work activities involving asbestos must be reduced to as far below the control limit as possible."[1]

Maybe this is where the differences arise. The UK are comfortable with a minimum practical level where risks are very low, whereas the US state none at all.

Thank you for helping answer a question and not mindlessly clicking on down vote. HN is beginning to turn into Reddit rather than seeking inquisitive technical/scientific conversation.

[1] https://www.hse.gov.uk/asbestos/regulations.htm

That link has to deal with regulation and risk mitigation for removing Asbestos, not selling a consumer product with Asbestos.

The UK took its time but they did fully ban Asbestos in 1999.

Asbestos has to be in a “friable” form for it to be bad. The particles are so small they can get into deep your lungs.

I actually was at a landfill expansion project where a backhoe digging down through the trash hit some bags labeled asbestos. I’m glad it was raining. Also worked in a building with asbestos in the floor tiles. Fine when not disturbed, but anytime they had to remove them it was a production.

https://ehs.oregonstate.edu/asb-when

https://www.fs.fed.us/eng/toolbox/haz/haz07b.htm

In high school I helped a friend rip up the floor tiles in his basement which were probably from the 50s. Years later I realized I could have been exposed to asbestos, is there any way to know whether asbestos would have been in the particular tiles I was ripping up?

You can get the tiles tested if you still have access to any of them.

I don't have much to add, but felt I should respond.

I feel like the risk is probably less than you think (the facilities people I worked with thought it was overkill for the tiles with a small % of asbestos). but its not zero. As someone who might have been exposed (was in a vacinity), its hard because you can never really know. Also there might have been other instances where exposure might have happened and you don't know (my high school was rebuilt recently because it wasn't 'up to code" when I was going there.

Thank you

As I understand it, there's also trace levels of naturally-occurring asbestos pretty much everywhere humans live, so there's also no way to completely avoid exposure.

The impact is cumulative so unavoidable environmental exposure increases the concern about additional exposure from consumer products.

Interestingly some uses of asbestos aren’t actually banned, which is very surprising to me: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/is-epa-allowing-asbestos-p...

As other comments have pointed out, talcum powder in its pure form is talc, which is a mineral and safe. The issue is that some cosmetics were contaminated with asbestos, which is not safe.

conspiracy to falsify info to regulators is a crime by itself

That’s not the question you asked and you know it.

That said, it is very much known that there are no safe levels of exposure. We know this from case data, but also pretty horrifically from workers who inadvertently gave their family members terminal illnesses later in life because they carried what would have at the time been considered fairly trivial amounts of loose dust home on their shoes/overalls/hair.

And guess what? Aftermarket brake pads are still made with asbestos! New vehicles sold in North America no longer have asbestos pads, but if you have had a vehicle long enough to have new pads put on then your car almost certainly has asbestos pads now!

https://www.theasbestosinstitute.com/2020/05/27/asbestos-in-... https://www.autoserviceworld.com/jobbernews/growing-threat-a...

So, if you happen to still do your own brake work, remember to spray down the parts with a water mister before you handle them to keep the dust from getting into the air. Vacuuming up any brake dust left behind is probably a bad idea too, wetting it down and handling as a liquid is safer.

As far as I know most OEM and aftermarket brake pads still contain asbestos and there is no ban on them. I read your links but they don't support the statement, "New vehicles sold in North America no longer have asbestos pads".

And talc is used in many products not just Johnson & Johnson baby powder. Many are things paint, plastics, paper, rubber, insulation, ceramics. But talc in cosmetics is probably the one way where people would be applying it to their skin for long periods of time.

Talc comes from the ground so sometimes there are veins of asbestos deposits interspersed. I think they screen out those sections with high asbestos contents but it might not be perfect enough so there might be trace contents.

Talc is a mineral in clay mined from underground deposits. It’s the softest mineral known to man and that makes it useful in a wide range of consumer and industrial products. Asbestos is also found underground, and veins of it can often be found in talc deposits, leading to a risk of cross-contamination, geologists say.

Full article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/14/business/talc-asbestos-po...

It wasn't the talc, it was the asbestos located near the mines and showed up in samples taken over the years, which J&J also obscured and best and covered up at worst.

All around classy company: https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/miracleindustry/americas...

Quote from the article:

“Oh, they’ve already reserved for that stuff,” one of them told me during a coffee break. He meant that in Johnson & Johnson’s financials, there had been money taken from earnings and put into a column vaguely called “accrued liabilities,” in order to account for the expected billions that might still have to be paid out in verdicts or settlements.

--------

I wonder how their accrued liabilities column looks like for the sunscreen products.

They will settle for 50 million. And sure, that's a lot of money, but not to them, not really. We started a rainy-day fund just for this occasion. The fund itself has already made five times that amount.

If anybody ever wondered, this is a concrete example of what it looks like when a company treats its negative externalities as a "cost of doing business".

That is sort of an inevitable human behavior, you just have to make the cost high enough.

And continue the liability to include the chains of command during the times of malpractice.

this is interesting. Given the biodiversity of human beings, it should be safe to say that any product may have negative consequences at scale. Certainly the HN crowd can appreciate what it means to work at scale. The fact that J&J knows these consequences exist and plans for them makes them evil? If your company planned on extra engineering resources strictly to assist launch issues, is that evil?

Evil comes from them knowing issues and shipping anyways (see the opioid crisis). Being prepared for adverse outcomes is just common sense.

There are benzene-free sunscreen products on the market and J&J could sell such products, but instead they decide not to in order to make more profit.

why would they add benzene to products? how does adding it make it cheaper to increase profits? Its not like some shady benzene dealer pays J&J to sprinkle it in, but only at really low levels (2-6 ppm). Its not like they chose benzene as an active ingredient over zinc oxide.

Engineers are asked all the time on ways to save money. Did they skip a processing step? is their process control not optimized? Of course they are pressured to improve. Lower costs drive down consumer prices and increase profits (thanks 401k).

https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/9279...

They don’t add anything to their products. Someone in China submits the lowest bid to make the thing, passing on sweatshop savings to J&J. So how then does the manufacturer make a profit? By skimping on the raw materials.

The root cause isn’t the supply chain or transparency or QA or whatever. It’s the attractiveness of too-good-to-be-true deals.

One is accepting the risk of not knowing almost infinite amount of chemical interaction of human bodies vs some novel chemistry but still maximizing the safety as its simply the right thing to do for everybody long term, including J&J. The other is accepting the usage of highly-questionable-at-best compounds as part of baby care products, because current bonuses take priority above everything else.

Evil comes in many ways. This can be argued is just massive negligence and ignorance, or even arrogance. As a father, when all this topic is paired with babies, I don't mind calling it evil and treat it as such.

agreed on all points, except the assumption of evil. There is certainly evil in the world, yet "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity".

Malice or stupidity, they both should be held accountable. They are prepared to be held accountable using this fund.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

I'd say greed falls somewhere much closer to malice than stupidity.

In America, you could have a product that saves 1000 lives but kills 1, and you'll get your pants sued off for the one.

This is one of those things that sounds bad on first glance, but doesn't withstand deeper scrutiny. It's largely either a good thing or else not true.

If the 1000 lives were not in imminent danger or else could have been saved by other means, it's not trivially true that only killing 1 in 1000 should be neglected. How does that compare to the alternative methods? Could it have been avoided with small or reasonable changes to the product? Were people properly informed of the risks? There's a bunch of stuff to unpack here. It's not trivially and obviously true that it's A Bad Thing to get sued if you save 1000 lives and kill 1.

On the other hand, if you are in the situation where those 1000 people are absolutely going to die imminently, your product has the only possible chance of saving them, and in the end 1 person dies sooner than they would have without treatment... you're not going to see a major and massive lawsuit out of this. You can be sued, but your annoying neighbor can also sue you for being annoying if they want. Doesn't mean it'll go anywhere, or that you'll lose your pants from it.

The government provides immunity for vaccine producers because of this.

Another example is nuclear power.

No, it’s not that at all. Accrued liabilities is a standard accounting practice. It only sounds sinister to you because you don’t know how accounting works.

https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/knowledge/ac...

This is standard accounting principles. GAAP/IFRS accounting require you to do this. It's not malicious

If penalty can be labelled as a cost of doing business, is it really a penalty?

JnJ tries to label each product differently so that bad name from one does not affect the name of the other. Such as in the case of Tylenol recall.

How do you know that other product lines are not affected by one raw supplier. Maybe there was some pollutant in a supply of product A that lots of companies use and put in their own products. They would also be affected.

I didn't find neutrogena in the original article or either of your links. Where does it say that's high in benzene?

The original article has a link to a petition the lab is making to the government. There they show a table of sunscreens sorted by concentration of benzene. Most of the top 20 entries are nutrogena.

I think that's a bit misleading. The clearest pattern I see in that data is that sprays are particularly bad. The top of the list is dominated by them, out of all proportion to their prevalence in the market overall. Any manufacturer who makes a lot of different products, and particularly spray products, is likely to have some entries on that list. Indeed, if you look at Appendix A (the "not detected" list) you'll find a ton of other products from Neutrogena, Banana Boat, and all the other big players. And a much lower percentage of sprays.

Without adjusting for the number of products a vendor makes, and how closely they're related (e.g. 70SPF vs. 50SPF versions of the same thing), you're going to get the wrong idea of who the "bad guys" are. For example, "Fruit of the Earth" has only one product on either list, and it's on the bad one. Would you buy their product over a Neutrogena gel or lotion?

Some of the products aren't even sunscreens, like "After-sun Aloe Vera Soothing Spray".

If they use a hydrocarbon propellant it’s not unlikely that it would contain some benzene. You could probably find some in many spray cans.

The EPA recommends avoiding aerosols if possible.

One of the down sides of moving away from CFCs is that some of the other chemicals used have their own problems.

https://www.valisure.com/wp-content/uploads/Valisure-Citizen...

The table begins on page 12.

From what I've seen, it's not that uncommon (eg the GM street car consipiracy). Companies aren't as overt as they used to be, but I think they still do it. One example I'm curious about is investment firms ownership in US car companies prior to the spike in oil prices and great recession.

> From what I've seen, it's not that uncommon (eg the GM street car consipiracy).

And much like the GM street car conspiracy it's just that, a conspiracy theory: https://la.curbed.com/2017/9/20/16340038/los-angeles-streetc...

Ironically Neutrogena received best rating when measuring their SPF (according to Consumer NZ). It’s my favourite too as it actually works, while zinc ones my partner touts are pain to apply and don’t really work that well in extreme sun.

From my previous research the benzene is confused with sodium benzene which is safe and widespread. Perhaps manufacture of it leave some trace.

Did you perhaps mean sodium benzoate? I've never heard of sodium benzene and it sounds highly unstable.

I'd be surprised if their detector confused sodium benzoate for benzene, because sodium benzoate is so common that that would make it a pretty useless detector!

I'm sure glad I took that Johnson and Johnson vaccine

Makes you wonder what else J&J could be doing to other products they manufacture.

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