(Since the trial, other internal J&J documents have become public, which show the company knew about the asbestos contamination for decades but suppressed the information.)Įgilman believes corporations have minimized their costs at the expense of their employees' health and that of the public and the environment-and that recent weakening of regulations has made that problem worse. It was the largest award in Missouri's history, and it may foreshadow thousands of pending cases. 'I actually put needles on a scale in front of the jury, several times.' After a 6-week trial, the jury awarded $4.69 billion to the 16 surviving women and the families of the six who had died. 'His bathroom scale analogy was brilliant,' says Mark Lanier, the Houston, Texas–based attorney who represented the women. He compared the company's methods to trying to weigh a needle on a bathroom scale. After examining thousands of pages of internal J&J documents unearthed during the litigation, he and his student researchers concluded that J&J found no asbestos in the talc because its tests were not sensitive enough. But Egilman's decisive contribution may have come from his scrutiny of company documents. J&J had its own experts, who said the talc was asbestos-free and there was no proof that the product caused cancer. From those data, he said, he could calculate the women's doses of the carcinogen, and he argued that their exposure had doubled their risk of ovarian cancer. He interviewed the women about their frequency and duration of talc use, and he factored in the levels of asbestos that outside scientists had found in samples of talc, which is sometimes mined from formations that also yield asbestos. They alleged the talc was tainted with asbestos and that exposure to the carcinogenic fiber likely played a role in their cancers.Įgilman, a professor of family medicine at Brown University who served as a paid expert witness, brought science and medical gravitas to his testimony. Like millions of women before them, they had dusted their babies with the powder and used it on themselves thousands of times. Louis, Missouri, courtroom last summer, David Egilman testified in a lawsuit filed by 22 women who claimed to have contracted ovarian cancer from exposure to Johnson & Johnson (J&J) baby powder.

Warning label expert deposition