‘I remember lying on a bed,’ says Sue Rizello of her earliest memory nearly 60 years ago, ‘with my mum leaning over me and using baby powder on me.’
Baby powder, or, more specifically, the talcum powder sold by pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson, is ‘one of those things which was there all my life … it’s very deeply embedded in the psyche that this was a gentle, safe product’, she tells Annie Kelly. ‘It was good for your baby. It’s good for you.’
Yet for Rizello, all that was to change. In her late 40s, she was diagnosed with an aggressive ovarian cancer. What’s more, she believes a lifetime’s use of Johnson & Johnson’s baby powder was to blame.
Senior news writer Esther Addley reports on a class action suit launched in October by more than 3,000 cancer survivors and their relatives claiming that Johnson & Johnson knowingly sold asbestos-contaminated talcum powder, and tried to withhold the evidence from consumers for years.
The company vigorously denies the accusation, and has stated that its baby powder was compliant with any required regulatory standards, did not contain asbestos and does not cause cancer.
