AbbVie headquarters
CHICAGO — Pharmaceutical makers Abbott Laboratories and AbbVie have renewed their push to pull the plug on efforts by trial lawyers to force the companies to pay for allegedly contributing to alleged toxic emissions of ethylene oxide plaintiffs claim have caused illness among people living in Lake County, saying their use of the chemicals were not only essential to health care, but also stopped years before the federal government greenlit a blitz of lawsuits by changing regulatory definitions.
On April 27, Abbott and its spinoff company, AbbVie, which are both based in Chicago's north suburbs in Lake County, filed motions asking a Cook County judge to dismiss some of the nearly 140 lawsuits they are facing over alleged emissions of the chemical compound known as ethylene oxide (EtO).
The motions come nearly a year and a half since a Cook County judge agreed to let plaintiffs and their trial lawyers add Abbott and AbbVie to the list of potential defendants amid a broader effort to extract paydays from Lake County companies that used EtO.
In their motions, however, the companies say judges should not allow the lawsuits to continue, because the pharmaceutical companies are not at all the same as the first wave of defendants in the case.
Attorneys led by the firm of Edelson P.C., of Chicago and San Francisco, have been in court since 2019 seeking millions of dollars from companies that used EtO.
The first lawsuits were filed on behalf of hundreds of plaintiffs against four companies: medical device makers and sterilizers Medline Industries, Cosmed, and Steris subsidiary Isomedix; and chemical manufacturer, Vantage Specialty Chemicals.
The lawsuits primarily centered around alleged EtO emissions from those companies from their facilities in and around Waukegan and Gurnee.
EtO has also been widely used by companies to sterilize a wide variety of medical devices and tools, including surgical implants like pacemakers and catheters, as well as surgical instruments.
Medical device makers have said EtO is all but essential to ensuring patient safety and preventing deadly infections in patients undergoing surgeries in operating rooms.
Because of its widespread use, EtO is present in the ambient air throughout much of the Chicago region, according to air pollution measurements conducted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Companies in the Chicago area and elsewhere, however, have been targeted in recent years by lawsuits from trial lawyers seeking big payouts and relying on government reports indicating long exposure to EtO could increase people's risk of contracting cancer.
In Illinois, the anti-ETO effort began when activists and trial lawyers targeted sterilization company Sterigenics, which operated a sterilization plant in west suburban Willowbrook.
The activists succeeded in persuading state officials to take action against Sterigenics and rewrite Illinois' pollution rules to severely limit EtO emissions, ultimately forcing Sterigenics to pull out of Illinois, even though the company had to that point never violated state or federal EtO emissions limits.
Sterigenics ultimately agreed to pay $408 million to settle more than 870 lawsuits on behalf of people who lived in and around Willowbrook.
Those settlements came after two cases against Sterigenics went to trial. In the first trial, a jury ordered Sterigenics to pay a woman $363 million. In the second trial, however, a jury sided with Sterigenics, declaring the company shouldn't be liable for a different woman's illness.
Nationally, EtO-related actions have resulted in settlements estimated to be worth more than $700 million collectively, according to some published estimates.
In Lake County, the initial wave of hundreds of lawsuits have also secured large settlements.
Last year, medical device sterilizer Steris agreed to pay $48 million to settle about 275 lawsuits against Steris subsidiary, Isomedix. That company had operated a sterilization plant in Waukegan, which used EtO gas to sterilize a host of essential medical devices and surgical tools.
Vantage agreed to settle 440 lawsuits against them, all of which sought to make the company pay for its alleged release of EtO into the air over decades of operations at its plant in suburban Gurnee. The company used EtO to manufacture base materials used by other companies to make a host of everyday consumer and essential industrial products.
According to court orders, the Vantage settlement terms are confidential.
And medical device manufacturer and distributor Medline also reached a settlement to resolve hundreds of cases it faces. According to court documents, that settlement, however, remains the subject of litigation between Medline and its insurers over how much of the cost of the settlement will be paid by the insurers.
Cases against Cosmed have been paused while the company moves through bankruptcy proceedings in federal court in Texas.
However, as the initial wave of lawsuits drew to a close against the initial defendants, in late 2024 and 2025, plaintiffs moved to widen their pursuit of EtO-related payouts by adding a new lineup of corporate defendants to their legal actions.
Those companies have included Abbott and AbbVie, as well as PPG Industries and BASF Corporation.
Those companies have cried foul over the move to rope them into the legal actions. In earlier motions, the companies particularly accused the plaintiffs of waiting years too long or engaging in unfair procedural tactics to tee up hundreds of lawsuits against them.
Now, Abbott and AbbVie have built on their claims in the new motions to dismiss.
In one of the motions, Abbott and AbbVie together particularly argue the plaintiffs' claims don't hold up against them, because they are not like the first group of four defendants.
Abbott and AbbVie note the original lawsuits centered on emissions only from two plants, in Waukegan and Gurnee, neither of which was operated by Abbott or AbbVie.
Abbott and AbbVie said their medical device sterilization facility in North Chicago "has not emitted EtO in over 25 years."
"But the Complaint says relatively little about AbbVie and Abbott and the North Chicago Facility," the companies say in their motion to dismiss.
The companies particularly noted the complaint does not include any allegations of any substantial EtO emissions from the North Chicago plant since 1990.
Rather, the companies say the plaintiffs are trying to make them pay for using EtO at all, because the companies allegedly should have known "as early as the 1950s" that EtO was carcinogenic and dangerous.
However, Abbott and AbbVie noted it was not until 2016 that the U.S. environmental regulators revised emissions guidelines and regulations to reclassify "EtO as carcinogenic to humans beyond the workplace," and declarign that EtO's "cancer potency" was 30 times stronger than scientists had previously determined.
"... Plaintiffs admit that AbbVie and Abbott could not have known the dangers of EtO until 2016 — nearly 20 years after Plaintiffs allege AbbVie and Abbott stopped using EtO," the companies said in their motion to dismiss.
"... Because Plaintiffs base their negligence claim on the foreseeability of information about the cancer potency of EtO that did not come to light until over a decade after AbbVie and Abbott are last alleged to have emitted EtO, Plaintiffs do not, and cannot, allege that AbbVie and Abbott knew low-level, ambient exposures to EtO could pose a risk of harm to Plaintiffs."
Further, the motion particularly asks the court to, at a minimum, toss the plaintiffs' claims asserting the use of EtO amounted to an "ultrahazardous" condition. The motion noted that other courts in Illinois, including in Cook County, have regularly eliminated that claim against companies that use EtO, and particularly those that use it to sterilize medical devices.
They note courts have agreed the use of EtO alone cannot be considered "ultrahazardous" because EtO use and emissions are regulated by state and federal government agencies. And, they said, using EtO to sterilize medical devices "is critical for the safe use of over 20 billion medical products each year and is invaluable to the community and to society."
"Plaintiffs’ bare assertion that defendants’ EtO activities 'offer little value to the surrounding community' cannot be reconciled with the simple fact that many medical devices may not be safe without EtO sterilization," the companies wrote.
Cook County Circuit Judge Kathy Flanagan has not yet ruled on the companies' motions to dismiss.
AbbVie is represented by attorney Mary Rose Alexander and others with the firm of Latham & Watkins, of Chicago.
Abbott is represented by attorney Terrence Dee and others with the firm of Winston & Strawn, of Chicago.
