Dive Brief:

• Almost all the claimants in a lawsuit against Sterigenics over damage allegedly caused by ethylene oxide (EtO) — used to sterilize reusable medical devices — have opted to participate in the settlement.
• Early this year, contract device sterilizer Sterigenics and its parent company Sotera Health agreed to pay $408 million to resolve hundreds of ethylene oxide cases without admitting liability. The latest update shows that all but three of the 882 claimants have accepted the settlement.
• The suits of the claimants who opted out will proceed to pretrial discovery and the “immaterial fraction” of the settlement they represent will revert to Sterigenics at the end of the year.

Dive Insight:

The settlement relates to Sterigenics’ former facility in Willowbrook, Illinois. In September, a jury ruled in favor of cancer survivor Susan Kamuda and awarded her $358.7 million. Months later, the company agreed to settle with another 882 people who claimed to have been affected by EtO emissions from the plant. Sterigenics settled without admitting liability. 

Now, Sotera has revealed that almost all of the claimants have opted to accept the settlement. The firm has already put $408 million in escrow for the case and expects no additional charges in association with the completion of the settlement. 

“We are pleased that 99.7% of the eligible claimants are participating in the settlements,” Sotera said in a statement on Thursday. “The agreements explicitly state that the settlements are not to be construed as an admission of liability, and Sterigenics maintains that its Willowbrook operations did not pose a safety risk to the surrounding community.”

The settlement marks a step toward the resolution of the legal problems but still leaves Sterigenics and Sotera with outstanding cases. The three people who declined the settlement will proceed to pretrial discovery and Sterigenics also faces lawsuits related to its other facilities.

In its quarterly financial filing, Sotera said it is the subject of tort lawsuits alleging personal injury by purported exposure to EtO emitted by its facilities in Atlanta and Santa Teresa, New Mexico.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Administration says that long-term exposure to EtO is linked to health problems — including increased cancer risks — and the agency issued a pair of proposals that it expects will reduce EtO emissions from commercial sterilization facilities by 80% per year.