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Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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 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.

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