Motorola cellphone
WASHINGTON - A D.C. court upheld the dismissal of lawsuits claiming cellphones cause cancer, saying trial judges properly excluded plaintiff experts who used studies on fruit flies and other questionable methods to justify their opinions.
Lawyers for 13 people sought to push forward with litigation against Motorola and other manufacturers by allowing their experts to testify to jurors about a supposed link between cellphone use and brain cancer. Such lawsuits are a long-sought goal by plaintiff lawyers and gained new support after the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), associated with the World Health Organization, added cellphones to its expansive list of products it claims are associated with cancer.
The experts failed to meet the legal test for admissibility, however, the D.C. Court of Appeals said in a July 17 ruling.
Plaintiff lawyers seized upon a change in how the D.C. courts assessed scientific evidence to try and submit revised reports and at least one new expert to revive their cases.
But the change to the so-called Daubert standard didn’t affect prior rulings requiring them to submit all of their evidence for a preliminary test for whether it supported general causation.
A succession of judges found the experts failed that test. An attempt to add Christopher Portier, the expert who triggered Roundup litigation when he was an IARC official, also failed.
Dr. Abraham Liboff tried to submit a report “that bore no relationship to his original report,” the appeals court said. Dr. Michael Kundi’s “Pragmatic Dialogue Approach” failed to provide data to support his conclusion cellphones cause cancer.
Dr. Igor Belyaev wasn’t an expert on brain cancer and didn’t properly analyze epidemiology. Dr. Dimitris Panagopoulos used studies on fruit flies to justify his claim and Dr. Wilhelm Mosgoeller acknowledged his theory cellphones cause cancer is “not generally accepted within the scientific community.”
The appeals court upheld the dismissal of all 13 cases for lack of evidence.
