Johnson & Johnson is suing four physicians over published research linking its talc-based baby powder products to mesothelioma, according to court documents.
A subsidiary of the company, LTL Management, filed the suit and is seeking a federal court's decision to make the physicians retract what they claimed in their findings or publish a correction.
In September 2022, a federal judge in the District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina ruled in favor of LTL's complaint against one physicians' initial research that made these claims and subsequently led to multiple studies thereafter related to asbestos and talc-powder.
Other research at the center of the controversy was published in 2020 and states that after a study of 75 patients with confirmed malignant mesothelioma cases "whose only known exposure to asbestos was repeated exposures to cosmetic talcum powders" were analyzed in a medical‐legal consultation.
From their findings, the physicians concluded that while "asbestos is the primary known cause of malignant mesothelioma. Some cosmetic talc products have been shown to contain asbestos," and wrote that "Recently, repeated exposures to cosmetic talc have been implicated as a cause of mesothelioma."
Following publication of these findings an additional, separate study furthering these conclusions — and written by the author LTL won its complaint against in September 2022 — was published in January 2023. They found that out of 166 individuals with known asbestos exposure, in 122 of the cases "the only known exposure to asbestos was from cosmetic talc."
LTL and Johnson & Johnson have refuted these findings and in court documents call the physician's research a "house of cards [that] is collapsing as the truth comes to light," the documents read. "The authors must be held accountable for their deceit and disparagement, which has caused harm to LTL, as well as all the women and men who have been misled into believing that talc powder caused their mesothelioma, and therefore have not addressed the true cause of their cancer."