> Johnson and Johnson - which just payed out on a case relating to cancer from baby-powders
I asked this question in another post and did not get a reply.
The US links sited state no evidence for talc causing cancer. A search of the NHS website also suggests no clear evidence [1]. Cancer Research (a respected UK charity) give a layman's summary (albeit focusing on ovarian cancer), stating no clear evidence and pointing out that there are far more serious risks to worry about [2].
Given the above, what is the hype about? Is this because the US is so insanely litigious?
We know that asbestos causes mesothelioma and that J&J baby powders contained asbestos since talc/asbestos are often found together in mines.
J&J knew for decades that they were shipping asbestos to consumers in a powder form that's regularly inhaled -- they ghost-wrote and sponsored studies to deny that asbestos existed in their products and lied to the FDA in their disclosures..
And guess what? Aftermarket brake pads are still made with asbestos! New vehicles sold in North America no longer have asbestos pads, but if you have had a vehicle long enough to have new pads put on then your car almost certainly has asbestos pads now!
So, if you happen to still do your own brake work, remember to spray down the parts with a water mister before you handle them to keep the dust from getting into the air. Vacuuming up any brake dust left behind is probably a bad idea too, wetting it down and handling as a liquid is safer.
As far as I know most OEM and aftermarket brake pads still contain asbestos and there is no ban on them. I read your links but they don't support the statement, "New vehicles sold in North America no longer have asbestos pads".
And talc is used in many products not just Johnson & Johnson baby powder. Many are things paint, plastics, paper, rubber, insulation, ceramics. But talc in cosmetics is probably the one way where people would be applying it to their skin for long periods of time.
> A Reuters examination of many of those documents, as well as deposition and trial testimony, shows that from at least 1971 to the early 2000s, the company’s raw talc and finished powders sometimes tested positive for small amounts of asbestos, and that company executives, mine managers, scientists, doctors and lawyers fretted over the problem and how to address it while failing to disclose it to regulators or the public.
I think you're being downvoted for not RTFA, not for asking a question.
> sometimes tested positive for small amounts of asbestos
And the question I have asked is where is the evidence that such small quantities are a risk? The UK links I have posted suggest otherwise. This is why I am asking.
I'm puzzled... are the US courts are saying "OMG Asbestos" rather than looking at safe levels? What if the same courts said "OMG 5G" ! This is why I am asking a genuine question.
Because there is no safe level of exposure to asbestos.
From the above Reuters article
"The World Health Organization and other authorities recognize no safe level of exposure to asbestos. While most people exposed never develop cancer, for some, even small amounts of asbestos are enough to trigger the disease years later."
Asbestos has to be in a “friable” form for it to be bad. The particles are so small they can get into deep your lungs.
I actually was at a landfill expansion project where a backhoe digging down through the trash hit some bags labeled asbestos. I’m glad it was raining. Also worked in a building with asbestos in the floor tiles. Fine when not disturbed, but anytime they had to remove them it was a production.
In high school I helped a friend rip up the floor tiles in his basement which were probably from the 50s. Years later I realized I could have been exposed to asbestos, is there any way to know whether asbestos would have been in the particular tiles I was ripping up?
I don't have much to add, but felt I should respond.
I feel like the risk is probably less than you think (the facilities people I worked with thought it was overkill for the tiles with a small % of asbestos). but its not zero.
As someone who might have been exposed (was in a vacinity), its hard because you can never really know. Also there might have been other instances where exposure might have happened and you don't know (my high school was rebuilt recently because it wasn't 'up to code" when I was going there.
As I understand it, there's also trace levels of naturally-occurring asbestos pretty much everywhere humans live, so there's also no way to completely avoid exposure.
> Because there is no safe level of exposure to asbestos.
I think we are getting to the bottom of this :-)
The UK Health and Safety Executive state...
"The control limit for asbestos is 0.1 asbestos fibres per cubic centimetre of air (0.1 f/cm3). The control limit is not a 'safe' level and exposure from work activities involving asbestos must be reduced to as far below the control limit as possible."[1]
Maybe this is where the differences arise. The UK are comfortable with a minimum practical level where risks are very low, whereas the US state none at all.
Thank you for helping answer a question and not mindlessly clicking on down vote. HN is beginning to turn into Reddit rather than seeking inquisitive technical/scientific conversation.
That’s not the question you asked and you know it.
That said, it is very much known that there are no safe levels of exposure. We know this from case data, but also pretty horrifically from workers who inadvertently gave their family members terminal illnesses later in life because they carried what would have at the time been considered fairly trivial amounts of loose dust home on their shoes/overalls/hair.
As other comments have pointed out, talcum powder in its pure form is talc, which is a mineral and safe. The issue is that some cosmetics were contaminated with asbestos, which is not safe.
The information in the article posted by the person you're responding to answers your questions - J&J knew their product had high levels of asbestos and hid it from regulators while doing nothing about it. There absolutely was evidence of this, if you would read any of the information posted above. If I sold you a bottle of water with enough asbestos in it to give you cancer, knew about it, and didn't tell you: that would be illegal - it is pretty straightforward.
Can't even downvote myself, but my guess is that it's related to the extremity of your position. It sounds a lot like you're saying since we know cyanide is poisonous by itself, it's very strange to be able to win a lawsuit if you find significant amounts of cyanide in your bread. Most bread is fine, right? So merely finding cyanide in it should only count as suspicion of a problem and not count as evidence... seems to be what you're saying.
Cyanide occurs naturally in apple cores. It is the dose that makes the poison.
The UK links I have cited say the low levels are not an issue. I've genuinely asked what evidence the US courts are using and I appear to have come up against group think. I did not expect this on HN.
I'd genuinely appreciate it if somebody can provide evidence citing the risk is other than negligible.
This is why I specified significant amounts, but the exact details of my highly contrived example are obviously not that important.
If you phrased it the way you phased this response, I think you would have gotten a better response.
You didn't phrase it as "I have reason to believe certain levels are not a problem, and I am unaware of the levels recorded in the lawsuit. Where they high enough to be a problem?"
You instead phrased it far more absolute terms that stated that 'merely' finding a dangerous substance in a product was not evidence of it being dangerous. It absolutely is evidence. It may not be sufficient evidence on it's own, but each piece of evidence does not need to be sufficient to prove the case entirely on it's own. Your statements have also carried the extremely strong implication - and that's being generous - that the US courts were definitely wrong. I don't think anybody read your posts and thought you were requesting information and not stating a strong position in defense of J&J.
People have limited time and effort. You made it as difficult as possible to get the information you wished. I wouldn't blame this one on HN groupthink.
The evidence is that there was enough asbestos in the talc to cause cancer, and multiple executives at Johnson and Johnson knew, and people who used it got cancer. I'm not sure how you could believe the people who unknowingly inhaled asbestos and rubbed it all over their babies do not have standing.
Thank you for being the first person to post an informative reply rather than down voting a question. HN is turning into reddit.
> I'm not sure how you could believe
Though this is unnecessarily insulting.
> the people who unknowingly inhaled asbestos and rubbed it all over their babies do not have standing.
If the concentration was so low as to be negligible (as the links I have posted state) then why the successful litigation? This is the question I am asking!
> The evidence is that there was enough asbestos in the talc to cause cancer,
This is the evidence I am asking for. The NHS and other respected UK bodies state differently. This seams to be a purely US issue and I am asking why.
Researchers at Johnson & Johnson detected unsafe levels of asbestos in the talc as part of their own internal testing. There are internal emails that show high level executives asking researchers to switch to a less sensitive test which would allow them to make the concentration of asbestos appear lower than it really was. I remember that when the story first dropped, the people writing J&J's press releases were very careful to use only the present tense when discussing the asbestos levels in their talcum products which implies to me that they did eventually rectify it. That's all I know. I didn't follow the story for very long.
It's not uncommon, science does not hold the ultimate truth of the world, it's a complex system based on intuition and beliefs and politics. Medical responsibility is highly complex and it does not follow the same rules (thankfully). In Europe, courts have been compensating people who got multiple sclerosis induced by the Hep B vaccine for decades even though there is no evidence of a causal link.
> Is this because the US is so insanely litigious?
Part of it is the weird setup of jury trials for civil cases, especially impactful in cases revolving around fairly technical, detail-oriented stuff like malpractice.
Twelve randomly selected lay people may not be the best determiners of scientific evidence and in-depth statistical analysis.
The legal standard for a conviction/judgement also changes, from "beyond a reasonable doubt" in criminal to "preponderance of the evidence" in civil- i.e. 99.9% certainty becomes 51% certainty.
Every criminal case involves more than a jury. The prosecutor has to decide to bring charges, judge has to accept the case, etc. Death penalty cases are more involved. I've sat through the automatic appeals that were part of California's process.
Talc is a mineral in clay mined from underground deposits. It’s the softest mineral known to man and that makes it useful in a wide range of consumer and industrial products.
Asbestos is also found underground, and veins of it can often be found in talc deposits, leading to a risk of cross-contamination, geologists say.
Talc comes from the ground so sometimes there are veins of asbestos deposits interspersed. I think they screen out those sections with high asbestos contents but it might not be perfect enough so there might be trace contents.
It wasn't the talc, it was the asbestos located near the mines and showed up in samples taken over the years, which J&J also obscured and best and covered up at worst.
There are lots of known carcinogens for which the dosage is important. For example... sunlight.
There's a reason the "this product contains a chemical known to the State of California to cause cancer" warning labels are a bit of a joke, after all.
You aren't guaranteed to die from being shot in the head either. However there are things which the medical community recognizes have no safe level of exposure.
From the original article: "The toxicity of benzene in humans has been well established for over 120 years. The hematotoxicity of benzene has been described as early as 1897. A study from 1939 on benzene stated that “exposure over a long period of time to any concentration of benzene greater than zero is not safe,” which is a comment reiterated in a 2010 review of benzene research specifically stating “There is probably no safe level of exposure to benzene, and all exposures constitute some risk in a linear, if not supralinear, and additive fashion.”
Because J&J didn't get in trouble for talc being carcinogenic. J&J got in trouble for their talc being contaminated with asbestos, which is definitely carcinogenic.
The GDPR has no problem AT ALL with cookies. Use as many as you like with no need for popups. However, if you are using cookies to track or personally identify me (advertisers take a bow), then you need to ask my permission to do so. And so you should.
I am unaware of how a browser may possibly be used to block only personally identifying cookies, and besides, putting the onus to do so onto the data owner is against the principle of the GDPR; that personal data is MINE and you must ask my permission to use it.
> It took another fifty years for the definition of a gentlemen to change to exclude people who got roaring drunk and pissed in the fireplace in the name of hospitality.
On the contrary, providing the above is done with panache it would pass quite well here..... *Never* whilst wearing White Tie though.
White Tie is formal dress; attending opera, meeting royalty, heads of state and the like. Gentlemen wear tailcoat (with medals), shirt with winged collar and white bow tie, or military dress uniform.
Black Tie ("Tuxedo" to use the Americanism) is semi-formal. A dinner jacket and a black bow tie *never* with a winged collar.
Whilst White Tie events are very formal, at a Black Tie event, one may still drink, puke and shag, provided it is done with style.
I'm going against the grain of most replies here. It isn't a specific chair you need (perfectly good, bog standard office chairs are fully adjustable and ten a penny) but to instead take regular stretch breaks and don't slouch.
If I was a Silicon Valley geek, I'd recommend regular 10 minute yoga breaks, but since I'm British I find frequent walks around the garden with a cup of tea do the job just as well :-)
The longer I have worked from home (15+ yrs) the shabbier my chairs have gotten.
Spending $2000 on a chair 10 years ago felt like an 'investment', but ultimately I found I still got fatigued even after focusing on posture and all that.
I currently sit on a folding metal chair at my desk out of laziness. I take walks around my garden and breaks to get water almost every hour. It works for me, your mileage may vary.
> I truly wonder why people still believe they have any privacy, any right to privacy, or, that they could do anything about it.
The GDPR (very good legislation forming one of our rights to privacy), and a host of UK/Europe national Data Protection Acts preceding it would take issue with this statement.
Its enforcement is severely lacking though, to the point where you wonder if the parties supposed to enforce it are actually benefiting from the status-quo.
> It’s increased regulation around a subject that I was not doing in the first place
Maybe you were handling personal data correctly. Very many were not (witness numerous data breaches and private data exploited that was held for no reason). Therefore regulation was needed.
Where does relaxed regulation and the reintroduction of morality into business mean a race to the bottom?
It also could’ve been implemented in such a way where there were no required new positions and the gov spent tax dollars to write a greatly detailed dummies guide to GDPR, how to implement it, etc so that smaller companies without the resources would have just as much of an advantage.
Your link contained no evidence for this. A search of the NHS website also suggests no clear evidence [1]. Cancer Research (a respected UK charity) give a layman's summary (albeit focusing on ovarian cancer), stating no clear evidence and pointing out that there are far more serious risks to worry about [2].
The GDPR has no problem AT ALL with cookies. Use as many as you like with no need for popups. However, if you are using cookies to track or personally identify me, then you need to ask my permission to do so. And so you should.
The amount of misinformation (some of it wilful) circulating about the GDPR on HN (a technical forum!) is shocking. If you consider yourself a professional developer then I strongly suggest you read a GDPR primer. There is no excuse not to. Following the GDPR will simply make your code safer when handling personal data.
The censorship you refer to happend 30-40 years ago under Thatcher [1]. Sense prevailed and these were promptly overturned.
I'm not sure what mentioning such old events brings to the conversation, any more than a discussion of modern US censorship would benefit from discussing the Satanic Panic under Reagan.
Perhaps you would care to elaborate?
[1] Many quipd that the reason she was cremated was that a burial grave would have needed a ballroom to be built above it.
As I said below.... double entendres, very common in Britain, appear to cause those in the West Coast US to panic for fear of being perceived sexist. In Britain (home of the panto [1]), we just smile childishly...... and maybe add a 'fnarr fnarr' for good measure.
Double-entendres are as English as Big Ben. Even in the most prudish of eras, it's just been a staple of their artistic production, all the way from Shakespeare's times. Occasionally I listen to '60s entertainment shows from BBC Radio and they are so full of them that the average American would probably consider it "blue" material today, let alone decades ago.
Its probably also worth pointing out to our American audience that the beauty of double entendres is that any "blue" meaning is clearly in the mind of those hearing them, nowhere else!
After all "Miss Shillings Orifice" is simply a carburettor part named after Miss Shilling. Any association with bodily orifices (and that one in particular) is in the mind of the listener who should hang their head in shame for having such a dirty mind :-) What *would* your mother think!
I would like to point out to the casual reader from elsewhere that the comments in this thread refer to a Britain of the past. A nation's sense of humour evolves rather quickly.
You got me looking for pantomime statistics in recent years :) Perhaps they're hard to find or perhaps I didn't try very hard, but the best I could come up with was this from 2013:
> Terri Paddock, Managing and Editorial Director of WhatsOnStage, commented: "In general, we're seeing fewer pantomimes mounted in recent years. As of today, we're listing 125 pantomimes in our nationwide database for this Christmas as compared with a peak in 1996 of 244.
My kid's primary school takes them every year (covid excepted) to a panto, and we as a family go to our local am-dram panto. Annecdotaly that village panto has half a dozen shows and is always packed.
The former is a professional show - although 125 just for professional seems low given that I know of at least 3 professional pantos within 10 miles of my house which covers a population of about 100k population
Professional UK panto income increased 30% from 2012 to 2016 with about 3 million people watching a professional one each year - about 1 in 20 people.
Dunno how english Big Ben is. It was built in a made-up architectural style because it was supposed to be 'english' but england didn't really have much of an architectural culture.
Also dunno about double-entendre. Seems a little bit depressing to me that a woman struggles through sexism to provide a life-saving invention then it ends up getting made into a vagina joke.
Unless you think of another country when you look at the clock hosted in a tower named after an English Queen that only exists in the English capital, or when you hear his distinctive gong that happens to introduce several broadcasts originating from such capital, I’d say Big Ben is pretty English, whether you appreciate it or not. But I’m sure opinions on this are divided. /s
It’s also sad that you cannot appreciate an intelligent form of art that is not, in itself, sexist. There are plenty of plays, films, and tv series, where the double-entendre is “pushed” by women (x) , and there are plenty of women who thoroughly enjoy the practice (x) (I’d argue most, but maybe I just move in working-class circles). I’m sure that, if you dig in the annals of engineering, sooner or later you’ll find something nicknamed after penis jokes. Is that sad? It’s just humans being humans.
There's nothing more german than oktoberfest, nothing more american than wearing a pair of star-spangled-banner trousers while shooting an assault rifle at a bald-headed eagle, and nothing more british than 'elisabeth tower'[1], named after a woman who's entire family tree consisted of french people that hanged a lot of english peasants.
That and the picture of Lord Kitchener, maybe with a cup of tea and a really shit cupcake.
[1] PS: I can see it's very authentically english that everybody corrected me on this. I can just imagine the conversation at a pub, with me trying to work out how to escape through methods short of suicide.
> a woman who's entire family tree consisted of french people
Actually, a woman whose family tree is almost entirely composed of German, Dutch, and Scandinavian people. No doubt they hanged quite a few English peasants too, after being literally invited to rule over the country; but, you know, pedantry and all that.
I understand the sentiment, but I would counter: there is nothing more British than turning something utterly non-British into a symbol of britishness (fancy some tea?), so trying to measure purity in this field is not very productive.
I'd say that Britain never really had a nationalist movement, because it had its anti-monarchist revolution before nations really existed, and basically became an empire at the same moment in time. So there was never really a great drive to invent a unifying British identity (compared to, say, 'Frenchness' or 'Germanness') - past the stuff that people sell to tourists, like red buses and policemen that let pregnant women piss in their helmets.
So since the empire collapsed after WW2, everybody has been casting around for some kind of identity, more and more frantically as more and more bits of the empire have sloughed off. Since Brexit, it's got a bit weird, with all politicians making all statements in front of massive union jacks, and I expect it will get weirder still when Scotland leaves.
Hopefully, the national conversation will arrive at the conclusion that heterogeneity is no bad thing, and we should simply devolve power (cultural as well as economic) to a local level rather than trying to enforce a kind of Disneyfied Boris-Johnson style 'Britishness' on everybody, but I'm not holding my breath.
I disagree. There used to be a very distinctive British identity, mostly associated with English upper-class ideals. The lower classes were periodically coopted into this identity, either after the industrial revolution that triggered mass-education or during periodic conflicts, and their aspirations were then pushed outward to colonize “inferior” people. This is how the British empire was built, and it definitely was nationalistic in outlook.
Of course, the mechanism eventually broke, because of the slaughter of WW1 put the lie to the dream and the rise of continent-sized superpowers put it materially out of reach. Since then, coopting lower classes into upper-class ideals has been unfeasible. A replacement emerged in the heyday of socialist movements (everyone eating the same food, working in the same factories), but then died off, as that way of life also disappeared. What followed is not homogeneous, I agree on that, but I think you’re discounting the strength of what was there before.
Not only could it not be more English, but it couldn't be more distinctively English. It's the only bell in the world that sounds quite like that, due to the fact that they hit it with too big a hammer in September 1859, and had to cut a hole around the resulting crack to stop it spreading.
I asked this question in another post and did not get a reply.
The US links sited state no evidence for talc causing cancer. A search of the NHS website also suggests no clear evidence [1]. Cancer Research (a respected UK charity) give a layman's summary (albeit focusing on ovarian cancer), stating no clear evidence and pointing out that there are far more serious risks to worry about [2].
Given the above, what is the hype about? Is this because the US is so insanely litigious?
[1] https://www.evidence.nhs.uk/search?om=[{%22ety%22:[%22Inform...
[2] https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/causes-of-canc...
EDIT: Down votes for asking a genuine question? Shame on you.