Document 2jBg9kX8zne7QaeMMEMvoOVOa

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL* Wedne.clay, Oct. 2,1974 (Page 1) Health Hazards 1 | Vinyl-Chloride Risks Were Known hy Many . Before First Deaths .Hindsight Shows Weakness In Firms' Systems Aimed * At Protecting Workers i The Tip of a Large Iceberg i j By Basin' KiuMnn j Staff Reporter o/Tiir. Wall SrnKTrr .Tm-nNAL A lew weeks before Christmas In 1948, ! Ear] Parks, then CG years old, signed on as I a helper-trainee at the large B. F. Goodrich Co. plastics factory In Louisville, Ky. The i plant had been making polyvinyl-chloride plastic from vinyl-chloride gs since before i the war, using a process developed by Good-1 t rich In 1937. ' It was a growing Industry that Mr. Parks joined. Polyvinyl chloride--dubbed PVC for short--had found special, but limited, appli cations In the war years, especially as a fireproof coating for electric wiring In fighter planes and ships. But In the late 1910s, jo.called vinyl consumer products.- j made from PVC, began ..coming Into vogue; and by the time the 1950s were under way polyvinyl-chloride products such as contain i ers, phonograph records and curtains' were . staples In American households. I The basic Goodrich process, still In use today, pipes vlnyl-chlorlde gas into large re Uhls <s the first of ftco stories con cerning implications of the discovery f that vinyl chloride con couse cancer. i actor vessels; there, the gas is agitated to gether with a liquid and catalysts. The1 process causes polymerization, a Unking to gether of the molecules of the gas (a mon omer) into the long chains thnt give rvc (a polymer) Its strength and other desired characteristics. The First Years In his tint years with Goodrich, it was Earl Park's Job to crawl Inside the reactors after each batch of PVC was drained off and to chip away that portion of the polymer that had congealed. During the hour-long task, repeated several times in the course of an eight-hour shift, Mr. Parks and other workers who performed the same function , would unavoidably Inhale the heavy, sweet-i ' smelling fumes of vinyl-chloride gas that had escaped polymerization. As the 1950s went by and the 1960s began, . Earl Parks was working his way up to the ,_Job of foreman, a post that he had attained by.tha time that ill health foreed hie early * retirement In tho late 1960s. In the years that he had worked with Goodrich, the PVC *Industry flourished as thousand! of new uses were discovered for tho polymer. On Mai ch 3, 1973. at the age of SO, Earl Parks died of angiosarcoma of the liver, a type of cancer ;that is invariably fatal, His death attracted scant public attention at the time, but today the significance of Mr. Park's Illness Is unquestionable and shatter ing In Its implications. For Earl Parks came to bo one more statistic in turning a hypothesis Into a reality: Vinyl chloride can cause cancer.; Deadly Statistics The link between angiosarcoma . and vinyl chlorido Is-furthcr buttressed by other deadly statistics. Seven of Mr. Park's fellow -workers at the Goodrich plant also con tracted the disease, and five havo died. In all, there have been 16 documented angio sarcoma eases in the U.S. in recent years, all of them linked to vinyl chlorido. In addi tion, 10 other cases have been reported inj Europe. While the total number of cases Is small,! the industry has been shaken to its roots. The disease now is known to work Insidi ously, slowly, during decades of exposure,' the Implications being that the cases thusfar are quite likely only the tip of an ice berg. Mine companies, with It plants and 910 employes, currently produce vinyl chlor ide monomer lrom ethylene, a petrochemi cal. The monomer, in lum, is used by 21 companies operating 36 major plants and employing 5,000 workers, to make more than five billion pounds of PVC annually. . (World-wide production la some 18 billion pounds annually.) Even the live billion pounds of FVC an nually produced in this country isn't enough to meet the domestic demand for the plastic Into which FVC la formed. From 3,000 to 1,OCO processors, employing an estimated 700.000 workers, fabricate the plastic into a wide variety of products ranging from vinyl floor tiles to shower curtains. According to a study done for the Society of the Plastics In-! dustry by Arthur D. Little Inc., os many as, 2.2 million jobs depend on polyvinyl-chloride plastic. If PVC were banned, the etudy says, the annual loss to industry in sales and pro duction would be some 565 billion lo 590 bil lion. (Ti.e Manufacturing Chemists Associa tion estimates the wholesale annual value of all PVC products Is 53 billion.) . Emergency Decree At the moment, no one believes the in dustry will suddenly come to a screeching halt. However, after the first human eases of vinyl chloride-indueed angiosarcoma were disclosed, the Labor Department's Oc cupational Safety and Health Administra tion Imposed a temporary emergency stan dard for PVC factories; thenceforth, OSHA decreed, the permissible level of vinyl chlor ide In the air of such factories would be 50 parts per million. Thnt level was far below the Industry standard, in effect tor years, of C00 parts per million, OSHA's emergency decree was made last May. Since then, animal research found that tumors develop at 50'parts per million. Yesterday, OSHA issued a new permanent standard requiring employers after Jan. 1, 1975, to reduce exposure to one part per mil lion in factory air, averaged over eight hours, and five parts per million averaged over any period no longer titan is minutes, (See story on page 22.) While considerably more stringent Ilian the emergency decree, the new permanent standard-particularly -with Us five-parts-per-million provision and its allowance f averaging--nevertheless (Alls short of the ''no delectable" limit advo cated by unions, many medical experts and such groups as the National. Institute for Oc cupational Safety nnd Health, and the Amqjican Chemical Society. Tills no-detect- able limit would have constant, not average, adherence to one-part-pcr-million levels. Therefore, It seems certain that ths argu ment wnn't abate. As the controversy continues. It is reveal ing to examine how the link between vinyl chloride and cancer was established. If nothing else, such an examination points out the grave weaknesses of the present system --or lack thereof--of protecting workers and others from industrial hazards. The judgment Is made In hindsight, but the history of vinyl chlorido shows thnt evi dence of Its toxicity was often Ignored. What's more, the chemical companies knew, but kept secret for at least six months, the fact that Italian researchers had shown that rats develop tumors, includ ing angiosarcoma, when exposed to low levels of vinyl chloride monomer. European companies, which paid for the animal re-` search, knew of these research findings for more than a year before the first human cases were reported but didn't reduce the exposure of their workers to vinyl chloride. But Dr. Irving J. Sellkoff, an expert on environmental carcinogens, or. cancer-caus ing agents, claims that blame shouldn't be placed at Industry's door alone. "We're all a bit responsible," he says. "None ot us did our homework." Culpability, he says, should be shared by scientists, government sgen-j cles and.labor unions. j The ease ot Earl Parks Is Illustrative.! Mr. Parks first came to the attenUon of Goo:'rich medical people in 1964, when the com ny, concerned about the known liver toxicity of ethylene dirhlorlde (a chcmlcil lrom which vinyl chloride Is made) tested the liver function of workers in the Louis, vine plant. Mr. Parks's readings were abnormal. Nevertheless, he continued to work at the same Job. In October 3961, however, he was hospitalized with what was Initially diag nosed as n bleeding ulcer. Doctors treated the "ulcer" without surgery, and Mr. Parks was released. He was readmitted to the hospital the fol lowing May, and the decision was made to operate. But when the operation waa begun, surgeons. Instead of llnding an ulcer, found Instead that Mr. Parks's problem resulted from severe liver damage, which had caused blood to back up in the portal vein leading into the liver. The surgeons cor rected the vein problem with a shunt and took a sample of liver tissue for analysis. The analysis showed that the liver had been damaged by exposure to "chemicals." Can cer wasn't mentioned, (According to testimony at OSHA's hear ings on vinyl chloride, held last June and July, Mr. Parks received a total of almost $6,040 In workman's compensation from Goodrich before he died,_but only nftcr Goodrich pretested that his nincti couldn't heve resulted from exposure to the chcmlcel.) .. . AP00001844 jj w*i an (ilert Louisville doctor who first mods'(ho connection between angiosarcoma end vinyl ebtarido. Or. John L.. Creech, who for years has treated workers sent to him by Goodrich on a fcc-per-pallcnt basis, had followed Karl Parks'* case for some time, even though he wasn't treating Mr. Parks. Dr. Creech cays he had been concerned about an abnormally high number of Good rich workers who had liver disease. When h* heard that Mr. Parks had died, he rc-( calls, he asked to tec the autopsy report. j * It was In August ISIS that Dr. Creech learned that Mr. Parks had died the pre-i vious March of angiosarcoma of the liver. I The doctor aaya he then realized that some thing was seriously anon:*, since another Goodrich PVC worker, a private patient of Dr. beech, had succumbed to the same, . type at cancer In 1971. Dr. Crccch says he i knew that liver angiosarcoma is exceedingly | rare and that two esses among such a small' 'plant population-was abnormal. (In fact, medical men estimate that fewer than 30 cases occur each year In the U.S., striking only one in 900,000 persons.) Dr. Creech met with Goodrich'* occupa tional health director. Dr. Maurice N. John-1 * son, who subsequently decided to ask Taber- shsw-Coopcr Associates Inc., a Berkeley, Calif., epidemiological-studies concern, to do a survey of Goodrich death records. But the study was hardly needed; on Dec. 18, a. third PVC worker at the Louisville plant died at the aga of 5S; ha had been at the plant tor 23 years. ' On Jan. 23 of this year, Goodrich officials snet in Washington with officials of the Ra tional Institute for Occupational Safety and Health and informed them of the three an- - flosareoma deaths. The following day, Ken tucky occupational-health officials also were ' Informed and Goodrich made its first public Announcement. Almost since its first commercial intro duction. there have been reports that vinyl chloride is toxic above certain levels. In deed, during World War n, vinyl chloride was rejected as a surgical anesthetic be cause animals developed heart irritation when exposed to it. In 1849, Russian scien- - tists reported "hepaUtis-like changes" in the livers of 25% of the workers in a smell PVC plant. Then, in the late 1950s, research toxocolo-1 gists at Dow Chemical Co. showed that ani mals exposed to as few as 100 parts per mil lion of vinyl chloride (or 100 molecules of vinyl chloride In every one million mole cules of air) developed slight liver damage. Based on its research, Dow began a pro gram in the 19S0j to seduee tho level of vinyl chloride monomer in tho air of its plants to below so parts per million. Dow published its results In 1991. But the rest of the industry chose to rely on a Yale University study that recommended soo parti per million as a safe level. This same level had been recommended by the Manu facturing Chemists Association since 195-1, was affirmed in 1963 by the American Con ference of Governmental Industrial Hygien ists end was given the force of law by OSHA in 1971. However, evidence at the OSHA hearings indicates that this level was regu larly exceeded until this year in many plants. (The hygienists' group didn't recom mend lowering the level to 200 parts per million until 1072, four years niter Dow con cluded from further tests that repeated cx-i posure by workers to vinyl-chloride mon omer at an average of 300 parts per million: or abovs for a working lifetime could cause! changes in the liver.) `! During the 19C0s, there were reports of a' disease called aeroosleolysia among vinyl- (Page 22 - Continued from page 2) chloride workers'.'The disease consists of skin lesions and changes In the blood ves sels, leading to degeneration el the bones at the tips of the fingers and toes in those ex posed to high levels of the monomer. (Emis sions of vinyl rhlorlde are generally lower at plants whero the monomer, or gas, is made, since the process Is less complex, and there is less chance for leaks than at the polymerization plants; none of the re ported angiosarcoma cases in this -country has occurred among workers making vinyl- chloride monomer, nnd only one of the 10 deaths In Europe was in a monomer plant.) In early 1997, the Manufacturing Chem ists Association arranged with the Unlver-i alty of Michigan to study aeroosleolysia among vinyl-chloride workers, particularly those who cleaned the reactor vessels and others who were exposed to large concentra tions of vinyl chloride in tho air. The Michi gan sciential* reported in 1970 that although they couldn't pinpoint vinyl chloride as the cause of the disease, worker exposure to the monomer should be cut to SO parts per mil lion or below. Other than Dow, which had already Insti tuted reductions In air levels of the mon omer, tho rest of the industry in the U.S. Ig nored the recommendation. Kor was there any significant reaction to findings by Euro pean Industry that animals developed ad verse effects from vinyl chloride. This was at least partly because the Europeans down graded the importance ol some of their find ings. For example, Prof. Pier Luigi Viola, a medical dlrseter employed In Italy by ol- vay Ss Cie., the Belgian chemicals company, found bone changes in rats exposed to air levels of 30,000 parts per million of vinyl chloride; even more important, he found that vinyl chloride at that level caused ma lignant tumors in the ear canals, lungs and bones of rats.-v . ; Prof. Viola reported his findings before, an International cancer congress in Houston in 1970. It was the first reported link be tween cancer and vinyl chloride. But the proiessor expressed doubt about the purity of the vinyl-chloride gas he had used and stated that the rat cancer findings, because they occurred at such high levels of the monomer, had no human Implications. (Prof. .Vtota subsequently found tumors In rats exposed to SOO parts per million; but this fact wasn't revealed until wtU after the first human angiosarcoma cases were' re vealed.) .............. Based on Prof. Viola's early cancer find ings in rats, Montedison S.p.A* the huge Halim chemicals company. In 1970 asked Ccsare Maltonl, a respected researcher at the Institute of Oncology In Bologna, Italy, to do more extensive animal sludes. By Oc tober 1972, Prof. Maltonl says, he had found that 250 parts per million cf vinyl chloride produced tumors in rats in three parts of tho body; the ear canals, kidneys tnd the' liver. The liver tumors included angiosar coma. The professor Immediately Informed his sponsors. Tha.Europeins offered their Information to the Manufacturing Chemists Association! in the U.S., but only if tho Americans guar anteed confidentiality. With great reluc tance, tho association says, tt finally agreed to the secrecy condition "because of the vital Importance of learning of any Indica tions from the European research .. . with out the delays which could have resulted from duplication of effort.'* On Jan. 30, 1973, a year before the first human angiosarcoma eases were reported by B. F. Goodrich, the MCA finally got the Maltonl data. For five months, the secrecy restrictions were such that government agencies, PVC workers exposed to vinyl chloride and even company doctors were kept in the dark. Then, in the late spring, the Europeans agTccd that the chemists' as sociation could pass the information on to the U.S. National Institute lor Occupational Safety and Health, the Labor Department agency that monitors worker safety. On July 17,1973, representatives of the associa tion and the agency met. There Is some dispute' as to what tran spired at the meeting. The Labor Depart* ment ngeney claims it wasn't given the full story; the chemists' association claims that the agency misunderstood tho findings. But ,rne thing is certain: The agency, and OSHA, made no move to change the stan dard of COO parts per million and didn't do so until after the human angiosarcoma esses were announced. In Europe, by con tras., Great Britain had lowered the maxi mum level to 200 parts per million following the eases of aeroesteelysix in the `60s; end West Germany had set a level of 100 parti per'milllon in 1970, based on Dow's 1961 re sults with animals. According to New Scien tist, the British selcnco journal, "No other secllon of the U.S. or European industry fol lowed Dow's lead. The reasons for Ihh in ternational confusion era obscure." This ail changed quickly, of course, onct the first human cases ot angiosarcoma were reported by Goodrich. Indeed, the swiftness with which new resoarch has been carried out since Jan. 23 Is perhaps without prece dent In the world of medicine and science. Much el this recent research is con- I eemed with studies of the incidence of dis ease of all types among vinyl-chloride work ers. Thus far, some studies show that work ers exposed to high levels of vinyl chloride show greater than expected Incidences not only of angiosarcoma but certain other can cers as well. The ramifications of these find ings for the future of the industry ar.d Its workers remain to ba teen. However, for tho veteran PVC workers, whatever changes the findings produce will be useless In counteracting tho insidious effects of working day after day, year after year, is what now is generally viewed as a contami nated atmosphere. . - AP00001845