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> It is very inflammatory.

Location matters. The immune system reacts differently to foreign bodies depending on what tissue is in contact with it.

Damn near anything you add to the plural space is going to send your immune system into overdrive - the cells that line the plural cavity (mesothelial cells) are programmed to respond a certain way to their environment.

Contrast that with the cell that line your respiratory tract. There are cells that produce mucus, cells with cilia that sweep the mucus away from the lungs. They don't respond with a massive inflammatory reaction to foreign substances like the plural space does (at least not in a healthy human - asthma patients are different).

Same with the reproductive tract, especially the female one. We can insert IUDs into the uterine cavity without a massive inflammatory response.

[riahi]

The peritoneal cavity and the pleural cavity have very similar linings.

Talc introduced into the peritoneum is similarly inflammatory and has been known since at least 1943:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/26104...

Work has been done to demonstrate that talc can migrate from external perineal application into the female reproductive tract.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6779257/

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Your last paper is particularly interesting! Not only the results, but also the disclaimer!

"The authors declare the following competing financial interest(s): J.J.G., W.R.W., and D.W.C. have served as consultants and provided expert testimony in talc and other environmental litigation."

Ok, well good to set the context here.

But lets look at the results of the controls (no talc exposure) where the conclusions are remarkably cryptic, but I think we can figure it out!

The paper looked at tissue samples from ovarian cancer patients - a group of six who reported decades of talc use on their bottom and six who said they didn't use talc.

They used two techniques - polarizing light microscopy (very simple technique to look for polarizing molecules like talc) and then SEM/EDX which uses an electron beam and then measures x-rays emitted to identify exactly what the particles are.

"Polarizing light microscopy, as shown in the table, revealed a range of two to 17 birefringent particles per slide; these values are comparable to the lower end of the polarizing light microscopy results of the exposed patient"

Conclusion: using the same initial technique, we actually see the same particles (suspected talc) in the controls, but "at the lower end of the range for exposed patients". Very vague, but we can conclude they saw suspected talc in the unexposed patients but on the lower end of the range for the exposed. But that means the two groups overlapped in suspected talc particles.

Well, we better confirm those results with another analytical technique to confirm it's talc, right?

"Correlative SEM/EDX of the control tissue blocks showed a total of four talc particles across all patients: two in patient 2 (right ovary) and two in patient 3 (right fallopian tube). Of note, in Supplementary Table 1, both these patients had pelvic surgery more than 30 years prior to their ovarian cancer surgical procedure."

Oh crap! Those are talc particles in the tissue in the people not exposed to talc. Where did it come from? Oh, but it's probably the surgery they underwent prior!

Which on the surface makes sense - gloves, instruments, gauze, needles might have talc particles on them. Hell, all these tissue samples were removed and then handles by a lab as well - a ton of more exposure to talc is possible! In both the test and control subjects.

But anyways, yeah, it was introduced during surgery, that explains why we see talc in the non-exposed controls. But wait!

"Among the five patients in the main study, two had a history of tubal ligation"

Oh man! The patients that did use talc had surgery too! But the article doesn't call out the contradiction - if the reason for the talc in the controls is surgery, and your test subjects also had surgery, then you should find talc too! They just call out the surgery in an attempt to claim that with a tubal ligation, talc should be blocked from moving up the fallopian tubes. They don't even realize they contradicted their own results.

Jesus Christ this is a terrible, terrible paper. Written up and published for the sole purpose of trial lawyers - the authors had made plenty of money testifying to that fact.

Then on top, they do a bunch of hand wavy stuff to explain away the talc in the samples of the non-exposed, but don't realize at the same time they are explaining away the results in the people exposed too.

Pure garbage.

[riahi]

> They just call out the surgery in an attempt to claim that with a tubal ligation, talc should be blocked from moving up the fallopian tubes. They don't even realize they contradicted their own results.

They did address this and noted that in patients with tubal ligation the talc distribution was different and lymphatic rather than “mechanical” through the fallopian tubes.

Still not sure what your angle is here.

It’s known that talc is inflammatory. It’s literally used with that intention medically. We don’t use powdered latex gloves in the modern day nearly as frequently as before, mostly because of latex allergy but also due to concerns that talc exposure leads to worse peritoneal scarring/adhesions.

The fact that talc is present inside the surgical specimens is bad in and of itself, regardless of how it got there. That implies an environmental cause for the malignancy, a la asbestos or smoking.

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I’m not sure you understood my reply at all.