No. 23-30854 - IN THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS

The undersigned counsel of record certifies that the following listed persons and entities as described in the fourth sentence of Rule 28.2.1, in i addition to those listed in the brief of plaintiff-appellant Floyd Ruffin, have an interest in the outcome of this case. [...] The “gold standard” methodology for drawing a scientific conclusion about the effect that a particular substance has on human health is a controlled study that exposes one group of people to the substance and compares outcomes for that group to outcomes for a similarly constituted control group that has not been exposed to the substance. [...] Once an observational study has revealed an association between exposure to a substance and a particular health condition, a researcher must next assess the likelihood that the substance is a cause of the condition—in other words, the likelihood that the increased incidence of the condition among exposed individuals would not have been observed but for the fact of exposure. [...] A set of nine factors known as the 7 Hill factors can guide epidemiologists in making causal inferences by prompting them to consider, for example, the temporal relationship between the exposure and the health outcome, the strength of the association between exposure and the risk of experiencing the outcome, and whether a causal relationship would cohere with existing knowledge about biological st. [...] But a level of dissimilarity between the facts of those studies and the facts of this case does not undermine those studies’ tendency to demonstrate for purposes of general causation that PAHs are capable of contributing to the risk of prostate cancer.