Califonia court rules J&J must pay woman with mesothelioma $29 million

pharmafile | March 14, 2019 | News story | Medical Communications, Sales and Marketing  

A California jury has ordered American healthcare conglomerate Johnson & Johnson to pay more than $29 million to a woman with mesothelioma who claimed asbestos in the firm’s talcum powder had caused her to develop cancer.

The verdict, delivered in California Superior Court in Oakland, comes as J&J face more than 13,000 talc-related lawsuits across the United States.

The jury found that J&J had failed to warn consumers of the health risks of its talc and thus awarded $29.4 million damages to Terry Leavitt and her husband. Leavitt was diagnosed with mesothelioma in 2017.

“Yet another jury has rejected J&J’s misleading claims that its talc was free of asbestos,” Leavitt’s lawyer, Moshe Maimon, said in a statement Wednesday. “The internal J&J documents that the jury saw, once more laid bare the shocking truth of decades of cover- up, deception and concealment by J&J.”

The company said it would appeal the decision on the grounds of “serious procedural and evidentiary errors” throughout the course of the trial. “We respect the legal process and reiterate that jury verdicts are not medical, scientific or regulatory conclusions about a product,” the company said.

Louis Goss

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