Article content continued

J&J was found to have known about the presence of small amounts of asbestos in its products from as early as 1971, a Reuters examination of company memos, internal reports and other confidential documents showed.

The report also said the company had commissioned and paid for studies conducted on its Baby Powder franchise and hired a ghostwriter to redraft the article that presented the findings in a journal.

In response to the report, the company said “any suggestion that Johnson & Johnson knew or hid information about the safety of talc is false.”

“This is all a calculated attempt to distract from the fact that thousands of independent tests prove our talc does not contain asbestos or cause cancer,” Ernie Knewitz, J&J’s vice president of global media relations, wrote in an emailed response to the report.

The company also said Baby Powder was asbestos-free and added it would continue to defend the safety of its product.

At least two Wall Street analysts said the stock appeared to be oversold on the news.

“In our opinion litigation overhangs are real, and we do not minimize the situation, but the stock pull back does seem over done to us,” BMO Capital Markets analyst Joanne Wuensch said.

J&J, in 1976, had assured the U.S. Food and Drug Administration that no asbestos was “detected in any sample” of talc produced between December 1972 and October 1973 when at least three tests by three different labs from 1972 to 1975 had found asbestos in its talc.