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Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

I'm still of the belief that the judgement was wrong. The link between asbestos and ovarian cancer is incredibly weak, let alone enough to indicate causality.

The amount of asbestos actually found in the powder was ridiculously low.

The only smoking gun was some internal emails where executives had some higher than baseline internal tests and they argued about the accuracy/reliability of them.

Based on everything I have read, I would not be concerned in the slightest about using Talc powder.

Asbestos was bad, but people have been conditioned to overrate it's danger to casual exposure because of the lifelong exposure to mesothelioma litigation where lawyers had a field day.

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https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3230399/

Have you seen anything newer that resoundingly disputes this and the studies cited herein?

More recent, and accounting for more recent studies: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S209379112...

First of all this was a study of women who worked with asbestos in an industrial setting. Not casual trace exposure.

Secondly, this only establishes a correlation (and a relatively weak one at that). But there are lots of other plausible links between choosing to work in a low income asbestos industry and ovarian cancer.

and the people suing used J&J baby powder their entire lives and put it on their infants. J&J also hid its findings from federal regulators, which doesn't make them seem as innocent as you're making them out to be.

I could be wrong, but the report seems to be that some mines contained asbestos, but that it was manageable, so the only relevant finding was that their end product "sometimes tested positive" for "small amounts" of asbestos during a 30-something-year period. Did the amount/frequency represent a legal responsibility to report it? Did it represent a moral responsibility, based on known science? I haven't seen much about that, and I'd love to hear from some source that at least appears to be attempting objectivity.

That's the thing - billions of people use talc products regularly. Millions develop ovarian cancer naturally. A small group of talc users suing

I'm not saying J&J did nothing wrong, but if you read the documents their testing scheme actually far exceeded the federal requirements and they regularly changed suppliers if they felt there was a risk of asbestos. Them throwing out outlier test data is only suspicious with the post-hoc assumption they were guilty of hiding something.

Those millions developing cancer naturally are an assumption - this is the issue with products that are so widespread that we don’t have a solid control group.

Certain other medical products imposed on the population raise similar concerns…

I've been following this litigation for a long time, and everything in this post is right. The scientific evidence of a causal link between talc usage and ovarian cancer simply doesn't exist.

What does exist: extremely sympathetic cancer patients that used talc, a faceless multinational corporation as defendant, a few documents in what was a huge amount of discovery that suggest disagreement over quality controls approaches and confidence in results, a bunch of plaintiff's attorneys on contingency-fees.

Add in a significant dose of innuendo and hand-waving and you're eventually going to find a jury that'll give you a billion dollar verdict, and so it happened.

You should do glyphosate next.

Corn starch is a better baby powder.

Talc is a rock. Rocks co-mingle with many minerals. As a rockhound, this is super evident. Tiger's eye is basically sealed in Asbestos. If you cut it with a tile saw you'll get very unhealthy tiny knives in your cells.

Rock powders are generally very harmful for people. Tile/countertop cutters get sick after working about 5-10 years, and that's with PPE.

My experience is that corn starch is a terrible substitute.

It's basically a complex carbohydrate. It's not inert, bacteria can feed on it. It tends to clump when wet. Seems like the exact opposite of what you'd want to put on potentially sweaty parts.

Talc is fantastic - it's basically an inert mineral. It can get wet, and it's still talc. Bacteria can't feed on it.

I wouldn't just lump all "rock powders" together in terms of risk. Asbestos is risky because of it's physical form and iron content. Other minerals don't have the same risk.

I would avoid inhaling any powders in general - whether rock powder or not.

Agree with most of what you have here but this stands out.

> Tile/countertop cutters get sick after working about 5-10 years, and that's with PPE.

I am not sure that is really true. There may be PPE involved but its either not being used properly or they are not capturing the dust properly.

Yep. J&J seems like they didn't do anything wrong.

Which judgement are you talking about?

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