Hacker News Reader

Comment by TeeMassive | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

This seems well into the realm of reactionary, and I'd love to avoid it on HN in particular. The physical and chemical worlds are absolutely chock full of things that sound terrifying, but pose no practical harm in low quantities over a human lifetime and are virtually impossible to truly 100% avoid. When you combine these two facts, you get important real-world concepts like "acceptable levels" or "acceptable durations" or exposure type distinction (e.g. inhalation vs contact).

This is the reason we don't let people who think in terms of "how many microscopic needles is it okay to have in my daughter's vagina" make legal decisions. It's the same reason we don't let victims decide the punishment for crimes.

This is not reactionary. This is what happens when you put talk on the butt of a baby girl each day until she's diaper free. If the quantity is detectable then it's far greater than the Avogadro number. These are physical needles that stay there over the years. How do you even study that?The safety studies have been done or financed by the same groups of companies that are getting sued. Chronic diseases are up in America since the rise of chemical industries in America.

> This is the reason we don't let people who think in terms

Well, in the world of civil lawsuits we do exactly this, which is sort of my overarching point here. Not much can be concluded from the settlement other than J&J being tired of litigation.

What I'm saying specifically is that only a few samples of talc over many years ever tested positive for any asbestos at all. It is likely that most of the plaintiffs were never actually exposed at all.

The burden of proof in civil cases is "a preponderance of the evidence", which is basically legalese for 51% likely or better.

That said, it is quite possible that pure talc itself is dangerous to epithelial cells but that's not well established yet.

Part of the issue is that several of the mines that J&J sourced its talc from were known to have asbestos, which some of their tests discovered — and then we left it up to the company for the next 50 years to continue their own testing and disclosure… it strains credulity that some tests at eg Windsor Mines showed “rather high” levels of asbestos fibers and then they completely stopped finding fibers from the same mine later on.

A responsible company would have stopped sourcing talc from asbestos-containing mines in favor of many other slightly more expensive sources that never showed any asbestos. J&J didn’t.

That's not to say there aren't a bunch of shady lawyers filing suits on behalf of people who didn't actually have provable damages from the products - but I think it's okay to hold companies to very high standards in cases like this.

It’s hard to know what to make of it, since there isn’t really much evidence of asbestos in the consumer product itself. The evidence is all circumstantial, which is my point. Maybe something happened but the bar for civil litigation is low, and it doesn’t really prove anything.

The problem with that, is that the company investigated itself and found no problems. And as others pointed out, the mines were known to contain asbestos and they continued anyway.

There’s a lack of evidence of asbestos in the final consumer product. That seems materially important.

It does seem sporadic on whether it ends up in the product, but since we're talking about product from 40-50 years ago, it's hard to say what was present in the old product.

Notably - in the 1950s, the USGS published guides on where to mine asbestos in the US [1]. This map is the precise geo coordinates that the USGS included for the Ludlow site and then the site of the Vermont J&J talc mine... literally 2 miles between the two. So again, consider my credulity strained that the only found contamination a handful of times decades ago mining talc directly next to known asbestos deposits.

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/43.383623,-72.647868/Argonau...

[1] Page 7 in Windsor County: https://web.archive.org/web/20200319042340id_/https://pubs.u...

A 2 mile distance is highly circumstantial. There are several big leaps here. The potential pervasiveness of asbestos in the talc is not well established. The exposure of the plaintiffs is not established. The link between trace asbestos in talc and the cancer in question is not well established. No other complicating factors were ruled out. It's just maybes all the way down.

Yes it is possible that J&J was careless, and the the product was tainted, and these plaintiffs were exposed, and their cancer was caused by that exposure but the evidence is VERY thin.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com