My talc claim.

Emmia

giraffe69 said:

I think talcum powder used to have significant amounts of asbestos in it and there has been suggestion that this is what made it carcinogenic. Some cases were settled in the US on that basis. Whether it applies to more modern talc where the asbestos component has been removed I don't know.

And there are different rules / standards between the USA and the UK (or EU) - so it is possible the UK product did not have asbestos at anytime even if the US product did. 

LightFlare

Also - unless it affects ALL possible brands of talc, how would anyone prove retrospectively that they used a certain one. ( or ones that are claimed to be affected)

DullGreyGuy

Emmia said:

giraffe69 said:

I think talcum powder used to have significant amounts of asbestos in it and there has been suggestion that this is what made it carcinogenic. Some cases were settled in the US on that basis. Whether it applies to more modern talc where the asbestos component has been removed I don't know.

And there are different rules / standards between the USA and the UK (or EU) - so it is possible the UK product did not have asbestos at anytime even if the US product did. 

Talc and asbestos are both naturally forming minerals and often co-exist together in the ground. By all accounts it's next to impossible to remove the asbestos from the talc during the refining process.  The level of asbestos does vary, depending on which mine in the world its sourced from but most manufacturers are buying raw material from multiple sources and mixing it together and at least in the mines listed in one research paper every single one had some level of asbestos in some samples. 

You can see in https://edm.parliament.uk/early-day-motion/58341/talcum-powder-asbestos-contaminants-and-cancer that even in 2020 J&J continued to legally sell talc in the UK which it knew contained asbestos after voluntarily stopping to sell it in the US 


The problem is that its easy to test for and explain how people got lung problems from using talc... they used a puffer to blow it onto their armpits or such, lots got in the air and was inhaled. Talc itself isn't good for your lungs but asbestos is worse. Easy to show in experiments how this would work and confirm in pathology labs that it did. 

To date there has been no definitive experiment that proved how the asbestos in talc got to cause ovarian cancer etc... there are some stats but that's not really a proof.