Johnson & Johnson to stop selling talc-based baby powder after flurry of lawsuits
Johnson & Johnson discontinued the sale of its talc-based baby powder products in the U.S. and Canada this week, citing a fall in demand, CNBC reported.
The company has faced thousands of lawsuits in the past, claiming the product caused cancer because it was contaminated with asbestos, according to The New York Times.
“Decades of scientific studies by medical experts around the world support the safety of our product,” Johnson & Johnson said in a statement to CNBC. “We will continue to vigorously defend the product, its safety, and the unfounded allegations against it and the company in the courtroom.”
All of the company’s existing inventory of the baby powder will be sold through retailers until supplies are gone, Bloomberg reported. The company started selling the products back in the 1890s, according to Bloomberg.
Past lawsuits have accused Johnson & Johnson of misleading customers by hiding the talc-based powder’s ties to cancer risks, Bloomberg reported. The company relaunched the product line in 2018 after demand declined, only to recall 33,000 bottles in the U.S. a year later after the Food and Drug Administration said it found trace amounts of asbestos in one bottle purchased online, according to CNBC.
Johnson & Johnson defended the product by saying the tests that found asbestos were faulty and the researchers were ill-equipped, The New York Times reported. Lawsuits from thousands of people - many of them women with ovarian cancer - claim the company was discussing the product’s risks internally but did not warn the public, according to the Times.
The company will continue to sell its cornstarch baby powder, which Johnson & Johnson started producing in 1980, Bloomberg reported. While some of the lawsuits brought against the company claim the talc-based products caused ovarian cancer, the scientific evidence was inconclusive, according to the Times.
This story was originally published May 19, 2020 at 8:32 PM with the headline "Johnson & Johnson to stop selling talc-based baby powder after flurry of lawsuits."