Unsealed emails reveal the role baby powder-maker Johnson & Johnson played in a report that an industry group submitted to U.S. regulators deciding whether to keep warnings off talc-based products linked to cancer, Bloomberg News reported. The emails -- unsealed in the state of Mississippi’s lawsuit against J&J over its refusal to add a safety warning -- show that J&J and its talc supplier chose the scientists hired by their trade association, the Personal Care Products Council, to write the 2009 report assessing talc-based powders’ health risks. They also show that the researchers changed the final version of their report at the companies’ behest. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said that it relied in part on the report in its decision to forgo a warning for the product. The emails among executives of J&J and Rio Tinto Minerals, its supplier at the time, provide a behind-the-scenes glimpse of dealings between companies and their industry group that successfully fended off a cancer warning on talc-based powders for nearly 40 years. Now, almost 39,000 users and their families are suing J&J, most claiming their ovarian cancers and those of loved ones were linked to asbestos, the potent carcinogen in the products, which were pulled from U.S. and Canadian shelves in May 2020.
