By Myron Levin on August 21, 2017
A Los Angeles jury today ordered Johnson & Johnson to pay damages of $417 million to a 62-year-old woman who blamed her ovarian cancer on years of using the company’s baby powder for feminine hygiene. It was the first California trial in the mushrooming legal battle over links between genital use of talc and ovarian…
Posted in FairWarning Reports | Tagged Environmental Safety and Health, Medical Errors, Pharmaceutical Industry and Drugs, Product Hazards and Recalls |
By Myron Levin on March 6, 2017
Editor's note: See update at bottom of story.
Breaking a string of lopsided courtroom defeats, Johnson & Johnson scored a legal victory Friday when a St. Louis jury rejected the claim of an ovarian cancer victim that her use of talc powders for feminine hygiene caused the disease. The defense verdict in St. Louis Circuit Court followed three plaintiffs’ victories last year with…
Posted in FairWarning Reports | Tagged Consumer Protection, Environmental Safety and Health, Medical Errors, Pharmaceutical Industry and Drugs, Product Hazards and Recalls |
By Myron Levin on February 9, 2017
Tobacco giant R.J. Reynolds, the top seller of the menthol cigarettes favored by most black smokers, is seizing on the hot button issue of police harassment of blacks to counter efforts by public health advocates to restrict menthol sales. In recent months, the company has quietly enlisted black groups and leaders, including civil rights activist…
Posted in FairWarning Investigates | Tagged Cigarette Smuggling, Consumer Protection, Product Hazards and Recalls, Smoking and Tobacco Industry |
Big Companies in Legal Scrapes Turn to Science-for-Hire Giant Exponent
By Myron Levin and Paul Feldman on December 13, 2016
The Fall of Icarus is the Greek myth about a youth who gets a pair of wax-and-feather wings but soars too close to the sun–melting the wings and casting him into the sea. In the 1990s, a consulting firm called Failure Analysis Associates ran tongue-in-cheek ads aimed at corporate lawyers that retold the myth as…
Posted in FairWarning Investigates | Tagged Air Pollution/Toxic Exposure, Auto and Highway Safety, Aviation Safety, Consumer Protection, Environmental Safety and Health, Food Supply, Product Hazards and Recalls, Smoking and Tobacco Industry, Workplace Safety and Health |
By Myron Levin on October 27, 2016
Health care products giant Johnson & Johnson suffered another big legal defeat late Thursday, when a St. Louis jury ordered the company and its talc supplier to pay about $70 million in damages to a woman who blamed her ovarian cancer on the use of talc powders for feminine hygiene. The award marked the third…
Posted in FairWarning Reports | Tagged In Focus, Product Hazards and Recalls |
By Myron Levin on May 2, 2016
Johnson & Johnson suffered a second straight legal defeat in defense of its signature talc products on Monday when it was ordered to pay $55 million in damages to a woman who blamed her ovarian cancer on the use of Johnson’s Baby Powder for feminine hygiene. After about 10 hours of deliberations, a state court…
Posted in FairWarning Reports | Tagged Environmental Safety and Health, Pharmaceutical Industry and Drugs, Product Hazards and Recalls |
By Myron Levin on March 23, 2016
Freakish as it may have seemed, the accident that killed 13-month-old Weston Kingsley was hardly unforeseeable. On the day he died in February 2014, he was buckled into his car seat behind his father, Jonathon Kingsley, who was at the wheel of the family minivan. Jonathon and his wife, Kelsey, of Old Fort, N.C., were…
Posted in FairWarning Investigates | Tagged Auto and Highway Safety, Product Hazards and Recalls
By Myron Levin on February 23, 2016
Editor's note: Editor's note: See update at end of story
Johnson & Johnson has suffered a major courtroom defeat in the first in a wave of lawsuits claiming that talc products marketed by the company for feminine hygiene use caused ovarian cancer. A jury in St. Louis late Monday night ordered the health care products giant to pay $72 million in compensatory and punitive damages…
Posted in FairWarning Reports | Tagged Environmental Safety and Health, Medical Errors, Pharmaceutical Industry and Drugs, Product Hazards and Recalls |
By Myron Levin on February 17, 2016
Recent research is focusing new attention on an asbestos-like mineral, blamed for staggering rates of a deadly cancer in Turkey, that also is found in the rocks and soil of 13 Western states. The U.S. Geological Survey has identified 95 sites where the mineral, erionite, exists. And a recent hazard assessment at one of the…
Posted in FairWarning Reports | Tagged Air Pollution/Toxic Exposure, Environmental Safety and Health, Workplace, Workplace Safety and Health |
By Myron Levin on November 17, 2015
Lorillard Tobacco donated nearly four times as much to Republican candidates as to Democrats in the 2014 congressional elections. No surprise there — most businesses count on Republicans to hold the line on regulations and taxes. But Lorillard made a striking exception for one set of Democrats: African Americans. It gave campaign cash to half…
Posted in FairWarning Investigates | Tagged Cigarette Smuggling, Product Hazards and Recalls, Smoking and Tobacco Industry |
