Pace Acquires Shealy Environmental Laboratory
Pace Analytical Services, LLC (Pace) headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, acquired Shealy Environmental Laboratory (Shealy) located in Columbia, South Carolina, on December 2, 2019. Pace indicated that the laboratory would undergo an immediate expansion to support the growth of the facility and that changes in branding and business operations would be minimal. Dan Wright, President of Shealy will continue to lead operations as a General Manager.
Cross Contamination from a Surprising Source
In October 2019, a laboratory reported asbestos in two of three Johnson & Johnson (J&J) baby powder samples from a single bottle. Although J&J felt the presence of asbestos was very unlikely, out of an abundance of caution, J&J immediately recalled ~33,000 bottles of its product and hired two third-party laboratories to perform additional testing.
Initially, at one of the third‑party laboratories, samples tested positive for asbestos. However, that third-party laboratory did additional research and discovered the asbestos was a result of cross contamination from an air conditioning unit. When those samples were reanalyzed in a different area of the laboratory, no asbestos was found.
In total, 155 samples were analyzed at the two third-party laboratories (32 from the bottle tested at the original laboratory and the remainder from other product bottles manufactured within a similar time frame). Additionally, the samples were analyzed by four different methods. Asbestos was not reported in any of those analyses. On December 3, 2019, J&J published a press release about the situation which included a link to the laboratory reports.
