It has taken out newspaper ads and readied its chief executive for his first television interview since tens of billions of dollars were erased from the company’s market value.

J&J shares fell nearly three per cent Monday in New York Stock Exchange trading. That drop was on top of the 10 per cent plunge that wiped out about $US40 billion ($A56 billion) of the company’s market capitalisation following the Reuters report on Friday.

J&J also announced on Monday it would repurchase up to $US5 billion of its common stock.

Senator Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat on the environment and public works committee, on Friday sent a letter to the head of the US Food and Drug Administration calling on the agency to investigate whether J&J misled regulators and whether its Baby Powder products threaten public health and safety.

J&J Chief Executive Alex Gorsky, in his first interview since the Reuters article was published, defended the company during an appearance on CNBC on Monday night.

J&J knew about the presence of small amounts of asbestos in its products from as early as 1971, a Reuters examination of company memos, internal reports and other confidential documents showed.

In response, J&J said on Friday that “any suggestion that Johnson & Johnson knew or hid information about the safety of talc is false”.

J&J ran a full-page ad in newspapers on Monday, including in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, asserting J&J had scientific evidence its talc was safe and beneficial to use.

“If we had any reasons to believe our talc was unsafe, it would be off our shelves,” the ad said.

J&J also rebutted Reuters’ report in a written critique and a video from Gorsky.

The written critique said Reuters omitted information it supplied to the news organisation that demonstrated Baby Powder was safe and did not cause cancer, that J&J’s Baby Powder had repeatedly been tested and found to be asbestos-free, and the company had co-operated with US and other regulators.

A Reuters spokeswoman said the agency “stands by its reporting”.

Reuters’ investigation found while most tests in past decades found no asbestos in J&J talc and talc products, tests on Baby Powder conducted by scientists in 1971 and in 1991, as well as by labs for plaintiffs in cancer lawsuits, found small amounts of asbestos.

The Reuters story drew no conclusions about whether talc itself causes ovarian cancer. Asbestos, however, is a carcinogen.

Reuters also found J&J tested only a fraction of the talc powder it sold.