The pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson has been ordered to pay $72million to the family of a deceased woman who claimed the brand’s Baby Powder caused her ovarian cancer.
Jackie Fox, from Birmingham Alabama, who passed away last year aged 62, claimed she had been using Johnson & Johnson products containing talcum powder as feminine hygiene products for more than 35 years. She was diagnosed with ovarian cancer two years before her death.
The jury in the case, which is the first of 1,200 pending nationally across the United States, decided that Fox’s son, Marvin Salter of Jacksonville, Florida, was entitled to $10 million in actual damages and $62 million in punitive damages.
Mr Salter said his family used talcum powder every day when he was growing up and said it was a bathroom staple in his mother’s house for as long as he could remember:
“It just became second nature, like brushing your teeth,” he said. “It’s a household name.”
During the three-week trial, lawyers for Mr. Fox introduced into evidence a September 1997 internal memo from a Johnson & Johnson medical consultant stating: “anybody who denies (the) risks” between “hygenic” talc use and ovarian cancer will be publicly perceived in the same light as those who denied a link between smoking cigarettes and cancer: “denying the obvious in the face of all evidence to the contrary.”
In a statement, spokesman for Johnson & Johnson Carol Goodrich said the verdict “goes against decades of sound science proving the safety of talc as a cosmetic ingredient in multiple products,” citing supportive research by the US Food and Drug Administration and National Cancer Institute.
