Free Republic

Johnson & Johnson shares sank 8% Friday after Reuters reported that the pharmaceutical giant knew for decades that its baby powder contained asbestos. Reuters reviewed documents, deposition, and trial testimony from at least 1971 to the early 2000s that it said showed powders and raw talc sometimes tested positively for small traces of asbestos. Furthermore, "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," the Reuters reporter Lisa Girion wrote. Johnson & Johnson issued a statement on Friday in response to the...

NEW YORK -- A 41-year-old paramedic who worked at a morgue for months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center was buried Monday after dying of an asbestos-related cancer. Deborah Reeve, a 17-year paramedic, died on March 15 of mesothelioma, a lung cancer associated with exposure to asbestos, her family said. Reeve developed a cough in late 2003 and retired at the end of 2004 after becoming too ill to work. Her doctors and family say her cancer was caused by exposure to toxic dust from the World Trade Center site. City health officials say it's...

......the lawyers signed up tens of thousands of "victims" for class-action lawsuits — picking up along the way some plaintiffs who had also filed claims as victims of asbestos. U.S. Silica, the country's largest sand maker, was flooded by more than 20,000 lawsuits in a short period that began in November 2002...But some judges, notaly Clinton appointee Janis Jack of the Federal District Court in Corpus Christi, Texas, aren't letting the trial lawyers run freely with silicosis as they did with asbestosis. Lawsuits on behalf of people diagnosed with asbestosis (which isn't always the same thing as actually having it)...

Back in June, federal Judge Janis Graham Jack disparaged nearly all of 10,000 claims for the rare lung disease as having been "manufactured for money." She also told the lawyers involved that federal prosecutors wanted access to the documents and X-rays surrounding this "fraud." So imagine Judge Jack's surprise to discover at a hearing last Monday that Houston attorney Scott Hooper -- one of several tort lawyers who brought the claims -- had removed more than 1,300 X-rays from a court depository. The judge had specifically denied Mr. Hooper's request to take the X-rays. Ms. Jack told Mr. Hooper that...

A federal grand jury has been convened in Manhattan to consider possible criminal charges arising out of civil litigation over exposure to silica and asbestos, according to lawyers involved in the civil cases. The grand jury has subpoenaed documents from at least one of the companies that screened people who later claimed they had suffered injuries as a result of exposure to silica, a material that can cause respiratory disease and that is used in making glass, paints, ceramics and other materials. The federal investigation comes amid questions about some silica-related claims that emerged in federal court proceedings in Corpus...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A bill to establish a $140 billion asbestos compensation fund was undergoing a rewrite on Wednesday after warnings that a provision affecting claims for silica, another lung-scarring mineral, could derail the legislation. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter said he thought he could solve the problem and save his plan to set up a trust fund to replace asbestos litigation. But other Republicans expressed exasperation with the process, charging Democrats were moving the goalposts each time bipartisan agreement on the fund seemed close. ``Right now I don't think it (Specter's proposal) has much support on the part...

Companies battling lawsuits brought by people claiming injuries caused by exposure to asbestos or silica have long contended that they are the victims of fraud. The companies finally have evidence that their concerns may be real. Thousands of people who have said they were injured by one potentially lethal material are apparently double-dipping - now asserting separately that they were injured by the other. More than half the plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit in Texas seeking compensation for exposure to silica - used in making glass, paint, ceramics and other materials - previously filed claims against a trust set up...