Stories like Mahlum’s are a staple in the controversy over silicone breast implants, but hers could have historic implications. On Oct. 28, a Nevada jury awarded her $4 million in compensatory damages from Dow Chemical Co.-and last week the jury added $10 million in punitive damages. Several large studies have failed to link silicone breast implants to illnesses like Mahlum’s, and Dow Chemical has never made, tested or sold the devices. But as a major investor in Dow Corning Corp., an implant maker that filed for bankruptcy protection last spring, the $20 billion parent company suddenly looks vulnerable. Though Dow Chemical vows to appeal the unprecedented verdict, it faces 13,000 similar lawsuits.
To pull Dow Chemical into the fray, Mahlum’s lawyers argued that the company helped conceal known dangers of silicone. Records reviewed at trial showed that the company’s scientists had studied the toxicity of various silicones since the 1950s. “They knew that it migrated to the brain in test animals and that it caused fetal deformities in rabbits,” says Geoffrey White, a Nevada lawyer who helped represent Mahlum. Dow Chemical countered that silicones are as varied as mushrooms-some toxic, some benign-and that company scientists didn’t work with the type that Dow Corning used to make implants. But such arguments were no match for Mahlum’s neighborly appeal. “To me,” she says, “it’s time these big companies take responsibility for what they do to us little people.”
No one denies that Mahlum is ill. Her condition bears many hallmarks of an auto-immune disease, such as lupus, Sjogren’s syndrome or rheumatoid arthritis, in which the immune system attacks the body’s own tissues. But no one has shown that silicone causes autoimmune reactions. In a 1994 study, researchers at the Mayo Clinic reviewed the medical records of 749 Minnesota women who had received implants over a 27-year period and found they were no more likely than other women to develop various autoimmune diseases. In a 1995 study, Harvard researchers reviewed the medical histories of 87,501 nurses, including 876 who had had silicone implants. Like the Mayo team, they found no evidence of silicone-related illness. Just last month the American College of Rheumatology issued a statement saying the two studies “provide compelling evidence that silicone implants expose patients to no demonstrable additional risk for connective tissue or rheumatic disease.”
New condition? Plaintiffs’ lawyers concede that the epidemiological studies have yet to reveal any hazards-but they dismiss the studies as worthless. For one thing, they say, the studies have been too small. If breast implants caused some horrible reaction in 1 out of 500 recipients, for example, it might not show up at all in studies involving just 800 or 900 recipients. The lawyers also complain that although silicone-related illnesses develop slowly, the studies have included many women whose implants are only a year or two old. Finally, they maintain that the studies have focused mainly on classic autoimmune diseases but that the conditions caused by silicone don’t quite match any of them. “If cigarette companies said they didn’t find a higher incidence of toot cancer in smokers, you’d laugh,” says Fredric Ellis, the Boston attorney who headed Mahlum’s legal team. “The same thing happened here.”
It’s possible, of course, that future research will firmly tie silicone to some health problems. But the current onslaught of litigation is fueled less by scientific evidence than by the vague suspicion that big business is up to no good. “It used to be that you actually had to show causation,” says Lester Brickman of New York’s Cardozo School of Law. “Today causation is no longer a scientific issue. If you have enough claims to put a company in risk of bankruptcy, you can buy causation.” With 18,000 suits pending, Dow Chemical had better hope he’s wrong.
January 1992 The FDA bans silicone implants, saying Dow Corning and other manufacturers failed to prove them safe
March 1962 Dow Coming quits the implant business, saying it has $250 million in lawsuit insurance
March 1994 Dow Corning and other makers put up 84.25 billion for women claiming injury
May 1995 Dow Corning files for bankruptcy
October 1995 Jury grants woman $14 million from parent company Dow Chemical
