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Jury awards more than $70M to California woman in baby powder lawsuit

A St. Louis jury on Thursday awarded a California woman more than $70 million in her lawsuit alleging that years of using Johnson & Johnson's baby powder caused her cancer, The Associated Press reported.

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The decision by the jury in the St. Louis Circuit Court case ended the trial that began Sept. 26 in the case brought by Deborah Giannecchini of Modesto, California. She was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2012. The suit accused Johnson & Johnson of "negligent conduct" in making and marketing its baby powder.

It is the third jury to award damages over claims that are the basis of about 2,000 pending state and federal lawsuits, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.

"We are pleased the jury did the right thing. They once again reaffirmed the need for Johnson & Johnson to warn the public of the ovarian cancer risk associated with its product," Jim Onder, an attorney for the plaintiff, told the AP.
"We deeply sympathize with the women and families impacted by ovarian cancer," Carol Goodrich, a spokeswoman with Johnson & Johnson, said in a statement. "We will appeal today's verdict because we are guided by the science, which supports the safety of Johnson's Baby Powder."

Johnson & Johnson is accused by more than 1,200 plaintiffs in state and federal courts of ignoring studies linking its Shower-to-Shower product and Johnson's Baby Powder to ovarian cancer, the Post-Dispatch reported. A St. Louis jury on Monday ordered the company to pay $55 million to a survivor of the disease in South Dakota. In February, another local jury awarded $72 million to relatives of an Alabama woman who died of ovarian cancer.

Two other cases in New Jersey were thrown out by a judge who said there wasn't reliable evidence that talc leads to ovarian cancer, an often fatal but relatively rare form of cancer. Ovarian cancer accounts for about 22,000 of the 1.7 million new cases of cancer expected to be diagnosed in the U.S. this year.
Much research has found no link or a weak one between ovarian cancer and using baby powder for feminine hygiene, and most major health groups have declared talc harmless. Johnson & Johnson, whose baby powder dominates the market, maintains it's perfectly safe.
But Jim Onder of the Onder Law Firm in suburban St. Louis, which represented plaintiffs in all three St. Louis cases, cited other research that began connecting talcum powder to ovarian cancer in the 1970s. He said case studies have indicated that women who regularly use talc on their genitals face up to a 40 percent higher risk of developing ovarian cancer.
Onder has accused Johnson & Johnson of marketing toward overweight women, blacks and Hispanics — the very same women most at-risk for ovarian cancer, he said.
The International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies genital use of talc as "possibly carcinogenic." The National Toxicology Program, made up of parts of several different government agencies, has not fully reviewed talc.
Talc is a mineral that is mined from deposits around the world, including the U.S. The softest of minerals, it's crushed into a white powder. It's been widely used in cosmetics and other personal care products to absorb moisture since at least 1894, when Johnson & Johnson's Baby Powder was launched. But it's mainly used in a variety of other products, including paint and plastics.
The two St. Louis verdicts were the first talcum powder cases in which money was awarded. A federal jury in 2013 sided with another South Dakota woman, but it ordered no damages, a spokeswoman for Onder's firm said.