Sterigenics, its parent company and a corporate predecessor should pay $363 million in damages for exposing a Willowbrook, Illinois, woman and thousands of others to cancer-causing ethylene oxide pollution, a Chicago-area jury decided Monday.
After a five-week trial and a day of deliberations, the Cook County jury decided breast-cancer survivor Sue Kamuda should get $38 million from the companies. Jurors imposed another $325 million in punitive damages as punishment for decades of toxic air pollution that drifted into neighborhoods near a former Willowbrook sterilization facility.
Sterigenics should pay $220 million, parent company Sotera Health $100 million and Griffith Foods $5 million, the jury decided.
The verdict exceeded the $346 million that Kamuda’s attorney, Patrick Salvi II, had urged the jury to assess during his closing arguments.
Lawyers for the companies argued that Salvi offered no proof that Kamuda’s breast cancer was caused by exposure to ethylene oxide. They also brought in industry-connected scientists who attempted to persuade the jury the Willowbrook facility never posed a danger to its neighbors.
Controversy has grown in recent years surrounding ethylene oxide, a chemical commonly used to sterilize medical equipment, but that is also present in other industrial and even diesel engine emissions.
In 2019, a federal report flagged census tracts in Georgia near a Sterigenics plant in Cobb County as having the potential for high-rates of cancer from long-term exposure to ethylene oxide. In the years since, hundreds of lawsuits have been filed over health issues allegedly linked to emissions from the plant, as well as a separate facility in Covington run by the health technology giant BD.
The companies have denied they are at fault, have touted the effectiveness of emissions control systems and contested changes in federal health assessments of ethylene oxide.
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