Fw: Silicone Exemption ~ The Washington Post (April 11, 1997)

[Guest guest]

From: " ilena rose " <ilena@...>

Sent: Saturday, March 17, 2001 6:28 PM

Subject: Silicone Exemption ~ The Washington Post (April 11, 1997)

> ~~~ thanks betty for digging this up ...

>

> http://www.junkscience.com/news/silicone.html

>

> Silicone Exemption

>

> The Washington Post (April 11, 1997)

>

> One of the more dangerous side effects of the toxic legal-medical tangle

> over breast implants has been the growing skittishness it inspires among

> makers and suppliers of the raw material silicone, who fear, not entirely

> without basis, that they could somehow be drawn into liability cases based

> on these or other silicone devices. Were this skittishness to get too

> widespread, representatives of the industries that make silicone and other

> " biomaterials " keep warning, companies might pull out of the business of

> supplying them, leading to life-threatening shortages of such devices as

> replacement joints and shunts to drain liquid.

>

> That argument is the basis for legislation recently introduced in both

> House and Senate at the urging of big biomaterials companies-not just Dow

> Chemical, which has been sued in connection with breast implants, but such

> chemical giants as DuPont-to create liability protection for the makers of

> biomaterials, except under certain circumstances of willful harm. You

could

> argue that these fears are overblown, particularly in the wake of several

> court rulings that breast implant victims may not sue for or recover

> damages from Dow Chemical Co., parent company of implant maker Dow Coming

> Corp. and a major developer of silicone before its use in breast implants

> was contemplated. Still, justified or not, companies' fears of liability

> can set off unmanageable ripples. What's interesting about these bills is

> that both include a so-called " carve-out' provision stipulating that none

> of the protections in the new law would apply to breast implants. This is

> because, as supporters of the bill agree, years of efforts to get a

hearing

> on the biomaterials problem have gone nowhere out of fears that such

> liability protection could become, or simply appear to be, a back-door way

> of clearing the makers of breast implants.

>

> The legislation, sponsored by Sens. ph Lieberman and McCain, has

> been pushed with a fanfare by medical supply groups that point to new

> surveys of worried companies and predict disaster if the bill is not

> passed. Besides patching a problem, passing the measure would have an

added

> advantage: It would take a genre of otherwise unrelated horror stories and

> object lessons off the table and out of the debate still raging on

> implants' safety and liability. Just for that, it may be worth doing. The

> implant fiasco has far too many extraneous matters mixed up in it already.

>

>