Thousands of UK women to sue Johnson & Johnson over claims talcum powder gave them ovarian cancer

What mother doesn’t remember the joy of lightly patting down their baby with talc after bathtime? Or of allowing her young daughter to try eye-shadow, blusher, even ­lipstick - with heart-warmingly comical results?

This week such family memories will have been shattered for parents ­everywhere with the news that almost 2,000 British women are to argue in court that this talc, this make-up, could have been killing them.

These women are at the heart of a UK class action lawsuit against American baby-powder producer Johnson & Johnson which alleges that some of its talc contained asbestos fibres, a potentially deadly material that can cause incurable cancer many years later.

Johnson & Johnson denies the claims and says independent testing by medical experts has confirmed that its products are safe.

I first warned of the potential danger of asbestos in talc - and the make-up in which it is often an ingredient - in the Daily Mail more than a year ago after meeting former City high-flyer Hannah Fletcher, 50, at her home in Oxshott, ­Surrey.

She is dying from mesothelioma, a terminal cancer caused by exposure to asbestos which affects the mesothelium, a membrane on the outside of the lungs, heart, intestines and abdomen.

It can cause cancer in any or all of these, but in Hannah’s case, her peritoneum - the lining of the abdomen - is affected. It can take anywhere from 20 to 60 years from exposure to asbestos fibres and symptoms developing.

There is no cure and once diagnosed, 60 per cent of patients die within 12 months.

Hannah’s cancer was first ­diagnosed in 2015. That she has lived so long has astonished her specialists, but she is very ill.

As well as endless rounds of chemotherapy and immunotherapy, her spleen, appendix and gall bladder have all been removed, and she has undergone a full hysterectomy.

‘My first memories are from when I was about four playing with my mum’s cosmetics on her chest of drawers,’ she told me. ‘She had the face powder everyone used to plaster over themselves back then, and a big box of eye-shadows and lipsticks.

‘While she was doing her make-up, my brother and I used to fight with the powder puffs, covering the carpet in talcum powder. It was such fun.’

More than 30,000 people in the US are suing over illness and cancer they allege was caused by asbestos in those products.

Last summer, American ­manufacturers Avon and Estee Lauder, and the latter’s ­subsidiary Clinique, reached a substantial “resolution” with Hannah to avoid going to trial in the US after her lawyers found a “silver bullet” proving that her mesothelioma was, indeed, caused by talc.

The companies denied liability for causing Hannah’s illness, but it is thought to have cost them a substantial sum to settle.

Her solicitor, Harminder Bains of Leigh Day, commissioned research by the world-renowned Mount Sinai hospital in New York. There, a biopsy of Hannah’s peritoneum found asbestos and talc fibres at the site of her cancer. The evidence was irrefutable.

Talc is a naturally occurring soft clay mineral compound. It is mined around the world, including in China, Brazil, France, India and the US. The mined talc is ground into a fine powder valued for its absorbent, deodorant and anti-chafing properties.

The problem is that talc is often found in the same locations as asbestos, which is also mined as a naturally occurring fibrous mineral. And sometimes the talc is contaminated by the asbestos.

The tragedy - or scandal - is that cosmetics companies have known that some talc contains asbestos since the 1960s - but some used testing methods that were not sensitive enough to find it, to convince regulators that the talc was safe.

Brendan Tully, the New York attorney who worked on Hannah’s case, said: “The talc issue turned out to be bigger than anyone expected, with everything from baby powder to children’s talcum powder, to expensive perfume powder, eye shadow and blusher, to foot powder used by men.

“Any product made with talc has the potential to be contaminated with a dangerous amount of asbestos fibres. In the 1970s, the cosmetics industry came up with a test for asbestos, using X-ray diffraction techniques.

“The idea was that the customer and regulators could be assured that their talc product was asbestos-free - but their test wasn’t sensitive enough to pick up asbestos at concentrations below 1-2 per cent, which could mean millions of asbestos fibres in a container. When a more sensitive test was used to check their results, asbestos was found in many supposedly asbestos-free cosmetics.”

Of course, the vast majority of talc - which these days is rigorously tested - is safe. The problem is, some is not. Sean Fitzgerald, a geologist and asbestos expert who has advised Nasa on rock formations, told me that he finds the material in around one of every 50 make-up samples he tests.

The Mesothelioma Center, an American patient advocacy group has claimed: “A Johnson & Johnson company memo from 1969 unsealed through litigation said it was normal for highly dangerous tremolite asbestos to occur in US talc deposits.”

Johnson & Johnson denies this and has always said that “any suggestion that Johnson & Johnson knew or hid information about the safety of talc is false”.

Claims of asbestos in make-up echo concerns over the fibres in public buildings - including 90 per cent of hospitals and 83 per cent of schools. The Daily Mail campaign “Asbestos - Britain’s Hidden Killer” is calling on the government to start to tackle this problem, which is resulting in more than 5,000 deaths per year. ­

Asbestos-related disease is now Britain’s biggest industrial killer, yet the policy of successive governments has been to leave it where it is if it is painted over or boxed in and not flaking.

But while tens of thousands of schools, hospitals and other non-domestic buildings are in increasingly poor states of repair, the policy is surely unfit for ­purpose.

Put simply, our public building stock is crumbling, and with that deterioration comes increased risk of exposure to asbestos fibres.

As a result, lawyers such as Harminder Bains, who represent victims, increasingly tell me that while their clients were once predominantly shipbuilders, engineers, miners and other workers in heavy industry and construction, they are now seeing more teachers, nurses, doctors and former school pupils.

These aren’t people who worked with asbestos - they are victims because they did their jobs in unsafe buildings.

Yet still there is no plan for a phased removal of asbestos from schools and hospitals or even an attempt to compile a database showing where it is in public buildings. We must ask “Why not?”

What both of these scandals have in common is that people are dying, leaving behind damaged and broken loved ones.

I first began campaigning for action on asbestos after I was told in June 2022 that my brother-in-law, Ian, had been diagnosed with mesothelioma and was given a terminal diagnosis of 18 months.

Decades earlier, he had worked in an industrial setting where asbestos had been present. Exposure there, like a ticking time bomb, was the cause. He died in September 2023.

I came to understand that asbestos - though banned in the Nineties - was not a thing of the past. It was everywhere - according to some estimates 6million tons of it in 1.5million buildings in the UK - yet nobody was doing anything about it.

That has to change. Politicians and corporate behemoths must rise to the challenge - no, duty - of protecting us from the danger of asbestos.