I don't know how much of this is real and how much of this is a money grab by mesothelioma lawyers.
My father died from mesothelioma. It's a tough way to go. Asbestos was rampant in the construction industry until it was banned in the 1970's. It can imbed itself in your tissue for 20 or 30 or 40 years before it causes cancer and kills you. In his case, it was the lungs.
Baby Powder obviously should NOT have asbestos it it and shame on anybody for using a substance that could contain it.
The structure of talc is chemically similar to asbestos, and it is also found in the ground where talc is mined. In the 70s when they realized it was harmful, J&J worked to remove it (it was minor trace amounts). In testing, there has been no asbestos in the baby powder since the early 80s.
Now that said, judges are finding in favor of people (mostly women) who say they used it in their underwear, and it caused their ovarian cancer.
Possible? Possibly. Likely? No. Even the American Cancer Society says there is little to no chance of it being the cause.
But its a multi-billion dollar corporation versus the little guys.
If you go back, a lot of the settlements, if not most have been reversed after the initial rulings. But the reversals dont make headlines like the original, "Granny from Omaha awarded 100 million dollars because the big bad company gave her cancer."