Talcum Power and Asbestos

I read with interest the decision by Johnson & Johnson to discontinue the sale of talc-based baby powder by 2023. While J&J has not sold talcum powder in the United States and Canada since 2020, the revised marketing strategy will apparently extend the ban globally. Thousands of lawsuits have been filed against the company, most regarding the health risk from asbestos fibers found in the product.

Asbestos has rightfully become a very dirty word that brings with it many negative connotations: complex and sometimes baffling mineralogy leading to equally complex and baffling technologies; cancers of various sorts, all of them dreadful; confusing and often contradictory medical information; a slew of dedicated legal firms specializing in Mesothelioma lawsuits; reports of government and industry cover-ups.

So how do asbestos fibers end up in a product that is intended for moms and babies? It would seem on the surface that this should never be allowed, but it is actually in large measure unavoidable, and relates to how talc is formed, and what kind of rock it’s found in.

Having worked around — and in — asbestos for much of my professional career, I have serious skin in the game (or should it be lung?), and have understandably spent a fair amount of time educating myself about this potential, and very personal health risk.

My primary exposure came in the late 1970s when I was project geologist on a nickel/cobalt/chromium deposit in northern California. We were drilling lateritic soils in which the metals were concentrated through weathering of the peridotite source rocks of the Josephine Ultramafic Sheet. (Click here for my Master’s thesis: “A Layperson’s Guide to the Josephine Ophiolite.”)

Ultramafic rocks, including peridotite, are generally assumed to have originated in the upper mantle, and as such are extremely rare at the surface. Since elements and minerals like to exist in places where they are comfortable (just like most of us do), these areas of high pressure and high temperature host metals that like it very much the same, including the nickel, cobalt, and chromium we were exploring for. All are considered “strategic metals” because of their enormous importance to our technological society.

(BTW: If you want to object to the exploration and mining of strategic metals because of their use in jets and bombs and such — or just because you’re opposed to anything that affects the earth — have at it! But it may be important to remember that nickel and chromium are also what put the “stainless” in stainless steel. If you ever go to the doctor or dentist and want to come home without a potentially life-threatening infection, you really need to support the nickel and chromium industries! Still not a fan? Click here for an earlier blog post about resource development in the United States.)

Anyway… back to 1977. We were drilling “dry” with a reverse circulation drill, and were bringing up — along with the targeted lateritic soils — the ground-up peridotite corestones and bedrock, most of which had been metamorphosed, at least partially, into serpentine and various related minerals, including asbestos. The dry cuttings vented into a device called a “cyclone.” The vortex killed the velocity of the cuttings, which then fell out of the bottom and through a splitter. Half of the cuttings went into sample bags and the other half was used to log the material that the drill encountered.

But… it was not uncommon for the drill to penetrate veins of long-fiber asbestos, especially once we got below the soil horizon and into the underlying serpentinite bedrock. Filling our hands (and the atmosphere) with fibers of rock was mighty impressive, and it was easy to see how this stuff could be woven into fireproof cloth, or fluffed up and used as insulation when resistance to heat and flame was important.

(For what it’s worth, at the beginning none of us had any appreciation for the health risk inherent in what we were doing, but we figured it out soon enough, and not long thereafter boogied to the local True-Value to get some particulate filters. Even Dave the Driller — surely the blond twin of Adonis — finally became a true believer, and accepted the prudence of a respirator mussing his golden locks.)

All of this bloviation brings us back to talc, another common mineral created during the serpentinization process. (BTW: Serpentinization is the process that creates a robust family of minerals collectively called serpentine and the metamorphic rock serpentinite. As we already know, the fine folks at GeoSpeak usually name things to make it simple, but may have missed the mark in this case. Click here for more on this unduly complicated vernacular.)

Without going into the gory details, suffice it to say that the serpentinization process alters the olivine and pyroxene minerals in the upper mantle peridotite into serpentine — a “hydrous silicate” that is stable (so to speak) at the lower temperatures and pressures found at the surface. If you are familiar with serpentinite you are probably aware that I use the term “stable” very loosely in this case.

There are a whole herd of serpentine minerals that, along with asbestos and talc, have common names that many of us recognize: jadeite, soapstone, sepiolite (a.k.a. meearschaum), and tiger’s eye are just a few of the myriad versions. Oh yeah, lots of minerals, and since they are formed together by the same metamorphic process, it is generally impossible to find any of them without also encountering one or more of the others.

The important association for this post is talc and the ever-present asbestos, and now we know why Johnson & Johnson has to abandon what has been a wildly popular and successful neo-natal and feminine health aid since 1894.

So it goes…

Legal update on J&J liability (1/30/23):

Summarized from the Daily Beast and Bloomberg Law:

A three-judge panel in Philadelphia ruled Monday that Johnson & Johnson can’t use a recently filed bankruptcy to quell lawsuits stemming from a cancer-causing ingredient used in its baby powder line. J&J had used Chapter 11 to place one of its units under court protection, blocking some 40,000 lawsuits from reaching juries.

Johnson & Johnson will challenge the ruling, the company said in a statement. The business has lost a number of lawsuits in the past, including one in which they paid upwards of $2 billion to victims of the talc-based baby powder formula, even after appealing the case all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court.