So damages were awarded to pay for that. That was the first medical monitoring case. After that, the next medical monitoring cases came from chemical spills. People claimed that they needed medical monitoring to see if some time down the road, they actually did develop an injury. Many of these cases did not survive when the plaintiffs had no present injury.
Tort law requires the plaintiff to have an injury, and without one the case was dismissed.
The case that broke the dam was the Paoli case in the Third Circuit. There was a claim that somehow the railroad yard owed them damages for their higher incidence of cancer. One type of damage that some of them claimed was for medical monitoring. The cases where people did not have any injury, but claimed that they needed medical monitoring, were thrown out by the lower courts. But on appeal, the Third Circuit said that their injury is the fact that they have to pay for medical monitoring.