LOS ANGELES – Defense attorneys for baby powder maker Johnson & Johnson predicted on Tuesday that attorneys for plaintiff Carolyn Weirick would not be able to rise to the burden of proof in a lawsuit that claimed the woman’s mesothelioma was caused by talc powder use.
“They have the burden of proving asbestos caused Mrs. Weirick’s mesothelioma, but they can’t meet that burden,” Chris Vejnoska attorney for Johnson & Johnson told a jury.
Live streaming coverage of the trial in the Los Angeles Superior Court is being supplied courtesy of Courtroom View Network.
During his opening remarks to the jury, Vejnoska relegated cancer to an often chance event - not from talc use.
“Most of the time we don’t know what causes cancer,” he said.
Team-attorney Brad DeJardin acting as a defense counsel for San Jose-based Imerys Talc America, a mining firm which purchased a Vermont talc mine from Johnson & Johnson in the 1980s and supplied the mineral to J&J, later said much the same thing.
“The evidence will show that bad stuff happens to good people sometimes,” DeJardin said.
The defense early-on defined mesothelioma as a rare condition (about 3,200 cases a year) and described it as a “dose-response” disease that often comes from overdosing on substances.
Vejnoska displayed a chart that listed potentially lethal dosages that could lead to mesothelioma, a terminal disease, for example regularly consuming over seven gallons of water, 75 cups of coffee, five pounds of sugar or 100 tablets of aspirin.
“When asbestos is the cause there needs to be enough exposure,” Vejnoska said. “Most mesothelioma in women has no external cause.”
Johnson & Johnson obtained its talc rock to be ground up into powder from mines in Vermont, Val Chisone in Italy and Guangxi, China, although Vejnoska said the Chinese talc was not involved in this case.
He said that findings time after time found no asbestos in the talc used by J&J. Over 170,000 samplings had been tested at a variety of labs and universities, he noted.
“You want to know how good it (testing) is?” he asked. “You’ve heard of the Shroud of Turin (burial robe of Christ). One of the testers, they sent the Shroud of Turin there (McCrone Laboratories).”
Tests of talc were done there monthly and quarterly, Vejnoska added.
“The findings were always the same,” he said. “No asbestos.”
In addition, Vejnoska said a roster of prestigious organizations had been involved in the testing of the talc including the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Harvard University, the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) and U.S. Geologic Survey (USGS), among others.
He also noted that state-of-the-art technical equipment including the TEM (Transmission Electron Microscope) and scopes using polarized light microscopy had been used to analyze the mineral.
The family of asbestos includes six minerals such as chrysotile, while non-asbestos minerals such as antigorite also include six derivatives. Tremolite is a mineral that can be asbestos or non-asbestos.
During previous talc powder trials much argument has been spent on the presence of tremolite detected in testing and its significance.
“One is carcinogenic (asbestos), the other (non-asbestos) is not,” Vejnoska said. “What the plaintiffs do is ignore these distinctions. Their mistaken assumption is, as long as it comes from an amphibole family and as long as it’s in a fiber shape - it’s asbestos.”
Vejnoska said no study has shown that non-asbestos tremolite was a health hazard.
DeJardin, an attorney with the Dentons law firm of Los Angeles, agreed the plaintiff’s burden of proving that Weirick’s mesothelioma had come as a result of talc use would fall short.
“The evidence will not back that up,” he said.
DeJardin exhibited a slide showing that a study of 1,722 miners and millers of talc over a 67-year period had showed no deaths from mesothelioma.
In the afternoon session, John Hopkins, the first witness, testified. A former Johnson & Johnson employee who worked for the company from 1976 to 2000, Hopkins testified in earlier talc trials and has been called the “corporate representative” of the company. He currently runs a toxicology consulting firm and answered questions on a tape filmed last April.
Hopkins agreed he knew extensive amounts of information on the quality of the talc used in the Johnson & Johnson products.
“It’s important to make it clear that nowhere has anyone shown in the baby powder or Shower to Shower there was asbestos present,” Hopkins said.
However under questioning by a plaintiff's attorney, Hopkins agreed an exhibited 1975 report from McCrone Labs located in Westmont, Ill., to Windsor Mills Co., the company that ran the Vermont talc mine that supplied Johnson & Johnson, stated that asbestos had been found in a number of different samplings.