Warehouse workers tested for PCB exposure

The warehouse has been closed and
workers sent home until further notice.

A Walmart returns processing center in Indianapolis is contaminated with a toxic substance, and hundreds of workers at the evacuated facility are now undergoing medical testing to see if they were exposed.

The contamination involves a massive warehouse, where logistics company Exel processes merchandise returned from Walmart retail stores.

The warehouse now sits empty after Exel ordered nearly 600 full-time and contract workers to evacuate the processing center on August 20.

On that day, supervisors met with employees at 3:45pm to announce the facility was shutting down immediately.

During the meeting, employees were not told the reason for the shut-down, only that they would continue to receive their normal pay and benefits and would not return to work until further notice, according to a longtime worker who asked not to be identified.

Five days later, Exel managers again met with employees at a nearby hotel to explain Walmart discovered the presence of a strange substance within the facility.

Testing showed the substance to be PCBs or polychlorinated biphenyl, a synthetic organic chemical compound that is highly toxic and classified by the US Environmental Protection Agency as "probable human carcinogens." The EPA says studies in animals provide conclusive evidence that PCBs cause cancer.

Over the past two weeks, Exel employees have been reporting to an east-side medical laboratory for blood tests, which Exel hopes will shed light on which employees were exposed to the PCBs and what impact - if any - the exposure might have on their health.

"It's a situation that continues to evolve, and we're working diligently with Walmart to understand it more," said Exel Vice President of Communications Lynn Anderson.

"We took an overly cautious role and decided we wanted to get out of the building right away. We are really trying to understand the extent of the contamination and the exposure and what it means for the future and the facility."

A Walmart company spokesperson says that Walmart made a joint decision with Exel to close operations "out of an abundance of caution."

"Walmart immediately hired an environmental consulting firm after a contractor servicing a return center we lease discovered the presence of PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls. Additional testing confirmed PCBs were present in the building, which is operated by a contractor, Exel Inc. We made a joint decision with Exel to close the facility out of an abundance of caution.

"Both the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Indiana Department of Environmental Management (IDEM) have been informed and are investigating this matter. We are cooperating with the investigation, and early indications suggest that the contaminant is in the building materials.

"We have made arrangements for returned products from our stores to be sent to other return centers."

Unusual particles discovered

Anderson says the contamination was discovered by accident, while equipment was being moved inside the plant. That's when workers found an unusual residue and "particles that didn't look right."

Walmart hired a third-party company to test the residue, and according to Exel, the testing revealed the presence of PCBs.

How much PCBs and where did they come from? Exel and its employees are still looking for answers.

Exel plans to begin its own independent testing at the abandoned warehouse this week. In the meantime, it is actively looking for another facility to resume its operations. Exel has not ruled out the possibility of returning to the contaminated facility, but says that is unlikely - at least in the short-term.

Since the evacuation, Exel has hosted two face-to-face meetings with affected employees to provide them with information, and another meeting is scheduled for early October.

At the last meeting, workers were encouraged to take advantage of free blood tests.

PCBs are considered very dangerous to human health, and they are very hard to destroy. Banned in the United States for decades, they were commonly used as coolants and stabilizers in products such as fluorescent light ballasts, transformers, paints, cements, electrical components, pesticides, lubricating oils and sealants.

A known carcinogen, PCBs are linked to other serious health concerns including negative impacts on the immune, reproductive and neurological systems.

Source: 1340 AM WBIW

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Chemical exposure at work linked to bladder cancer

High bladder cancer rate shrouds New York plant, exposing chemical hazards in the workplace

Chemical plant workers were exposed
to hazardous chemicals for decades.

NIAGARA FALLS, N.Y. — Ray Kline signed on as an operator at the local Goodyear chemical plant in 1960 and logged just short of 40 years. He routinely worked six days a week, 12 hours a day, retiring in 1999 as head of maintenance.

Kline, 75, has also endured two bouts of bladder cancer. Strong evidence suggests the disease was work-related.

In a yet-to-be published study, federal health investigators have confirmed 50 cases of bladder cancer among plant employees through 2007, nearly three times the number that would have been expected in the general population of New York State.

The unofficial tally to date, compiled by a lawyer for some of the cancer victims, is 58 cases.

The likely trigger in most instances, investigators concluded, was a chemical, still used by Goodyear and others, called ortho-toluidine.

The disease made its appearance in 1972 and continues to plague this decaying pocket of western New York. Many question why the chemical’s most prominent manufacturer, DuPont, took so long to issue warnings.

The long-running episode underscores the limits of regulation and points up the insidious nature of occupational illnesses, which by one estimate take more than 50,000 lives in America each year.

It’s a cautionary tale at a time when more than 80,000 chemicals, many carrying unknown or little-understood health effects, are on the market in the United States.

Workers can become unwitting test subjects, made vulnerable by employers that fail to act on scientific knowledge or, in extreme cases, suppress the truth.

Three years before Kline landed at Goodyear, the plant began making Nailax, an antioxidant that keeps tires from cracking. Three U.S. companies supplied a key ingredient, ortho-toluidine, at various times from the 1950s into the 1990s; DuPont supplied Goodyear for the longest period, almost four decades.

Manufacturer knew of risks

By 1955, records show, DuPont knew the chemical caused bladder cancer in laboratory animals and protected its own workers from it. But it didn’t issue warnings to Goodyear and other customers until 1977, the year Kline’s son-in-law, Harry Weist, started at the Niagara Falls plant.

It would be another 13 years before Goodyear would take significant steps to reduce exposures to ortho-toluidine in the plant. By then, the outbreak of bladder cancer was under way.

Kline was case No. 21, diagnosed in 1997. Weist was No. 37, diagnosed in 2004.

In a statement to the Center for Public Integrity, Goodyear said it “takes the issue of ortho-toluidine exposure at the Niagara Falls plant very seriously. We are deeply concerned and continue to be committed to actions to address the issue.”

DuPont said it “conducts its business in accordance with the highest ethical standards and in compliance with all applicable laws to ensure the safety and health of our employees, our customers, and the people of the communities in which we operate. Our experience with ortho-toluidine was no exception.”

Its communications about the chemical were, DuPont said, “commensurate with the state of scientific knowledge” at the time.

Steve Wodka, a lawyer in Little Silver, N.J., maintains DuPont could have told Goodyear how to use ortho-toluidine safely by 1957, when Goodyear’s rubber chemicals division opened in Niagara Falls.

“There were so many warning signals,” said Wodka, who has sued DuPont and other ortho-toluidine suppliers on behalf of 24 bladder cancer victims from Goodyear and three from the now-shuttered Morton International chemical plant in Paterson, N.J. “If people had simply heeded them, there would have been a lot of lives saved.”

Editor's note: This article has been edited for length. 

Source: Center for Public Integrity

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Occupational exposure to chemical used in PVC production linked to kidney stones

A study by researchers at UB and three Chinese research institutions is the first to demonstrate that low-level occupational exposure to the industrial chemical trimethyltin chloride (TMT) may be a risk factor for nephrolithiasis, or kidney stones.

TMT is a deadly neurotoxin produced as a byproduct of the plastic-stabilization process. At high levels it is implicated in a wide range of neurological disorders; acute poisoning has caused death.

The hunt is on for the cause of the silent epidemic of nephrolithiasis, an excruciating, unpredictable, treatable but potentially deadly disease whose prevalence and incidence has been increasing globally across divisions of age, sex and race. Its prevalence in the U.S. alone doubled between 1994 and 2010, and is rising among men, women and in children as young as 5. Researchers have taken aim at processed and junk foods, obesity and rising temperatures as causal agents.

“This study provides evidence that even low-level exposure to TMT in the workplace may increase the risk of developing kidney stones, a disease for which effective treatment is not universally available,” says co-author Xuefeng Ren, assistant professor in the UB departments of Social and Preventive Medicine, and Pharmacology and Toxicology.

“There is not enough information available about environmental methyltin exposure,” Ren says, “but given the widespread use of PVC pipes in public facilities, homes and workplaces, there is growing concern that methyltins leached from these materials can contaminate drinking water, food and various ecosystems.

“This study, combined with the recent epidemic of kidney disease, highlights the unique vulnerability of the kidney to environmental assault,” he says.

“We suggest that larger, more comprehensive studies be undertaken to confirm these findings, particularly in members of the general public, who may encounter low levels of TMT and other methyltin compounds through drinking water or other pathways.”

Ren says that in the U.S., the occupational exposure limits (OEL) for methyltins have not been established. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health’s recommended exposure limits for all organotin compounds, including methyltins, are 0.1 mg/m (permissible concentration-time weighted average, PC-TWA) and 0.2 mg/m (permissible concentration-short term exposure limit, PC-STEL). Although the 8 hour time-weighted average of TMT air level in this study was 0.013 (0.008, 0.028) mg/m, much lower than the U.S. standards, it still produced stones.

The study is a cross-sectional analysis of 335 workers in three plants in the manufacturing hub of Qing Yuan, a city in Guangdong, China. The study group comprised 216 workers in two plants that use methyltins as the heat stabilizer for PVC production in the manufacture of plastic window blinds. A control group of 119 workers was recruited from a factory that did not employ TMT in its manufacturing process.

Researchers employed a variety of research instruments, including air sampling, interviews, questionnaires, clinical examination that included ultrasonography, and blood and urine samples collected at the end of work shifts from both study and control groups.

They found that, relative to subjects in the control group:

• The prevalence of kidney stones determined by abdominal ultrasonography was 18.06 percent in the TMT exposure group and only 5.88 percent in the control workers (p<0.01).
• Increased TMT levels in personal air samples, blood and urine had statistically significant positive associations for the risk of kidney stones.
• The length of employment at the window blind plants also was strongly positively associated with the development of kidney stones in the TMT exposure group.
• TMT-exposed workers were more likely to have specific clinical symptoms of, or abnormal laboratory tests for, hypertension, gallstones, kidney stones, abnormal ECG, low hemoglobin count, elevated aspartate aminotransferase activity and occult blood in the urine.
• Even workers with a relatively low level of occupational TMT exposure were more likely to have kidney stones than those in the control group.

The study, “Chronic low level trimethyltin exposure and the risk of developing nephrolithiasis,” was published in the most recent issue of Occupational and Environmental Medicine.

Worker files suits against Refineries in PA, NJ, OH, DE for benzene exposure

Source:HarrisMartin.com
A former independent laborer has filed a lawsuit in Pennsylvania state court, claiming that his exposure to benzene-containing products lead to his acute myelogenous leukemia.

The suit contends that Andre Harvey’s work as an independently contracted laborer and boiler maker at several refineries in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware and Ohio exposed him to the chemical.

Benzene is a colorless, flammable liquid with a sweet odor. It is among the top 20 most widely used chemicals in the U.S. The EPA has classified benzene as a Group A, know.n human carcinogen and says people occupationally exposed to benzene have an increased incidence of leukemia




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Study finds breast cancer risk higher in some jobs

A study published in BioMed Central's Environmental Health confirms that certain occupations do pose a higher risk of breast cancer than others, particularly those that expose the worker to potential carcinogens and endocrine disrupters.


 In their study, James T Brophy and his colleagues set out to characterize the possible links between breast cancer and occupation, particularly in manufacturing and farming.

The study was conducted in Southern Ontario, Canada, and included 1006 breast cancer cases with 1147 randomly selected and matched community controls. Using interviews and surveys, the team collected data on participants' occupational and reproductive histories. All jobs were coded for their likelihood of exposure to carcinogens and endocrine disruptors, and patients' tumor pathology regarding endocrine receptor status was assessed.

The authors found in this group of participants that, across all sectors, women in jobs with potentially high exposures to carcinogens and endocrine disrupters had an elevated breast cancer risk. Sectors with increased risk included:

• Agriculture
• Bar/gambling
• Automotive plastics manufacturing
• Food canning and metal-working

Importantly, pre-menopausal breast cancer risk was highest in the automotive plastics and food canning industries.

The findings also suggested that women with lower socioeconomic status had an elevated risk of breast cancer, which may result from higher exposures to endocrine-disrupting chemicals in the lower-income manufacturing and agricultural industries of the study area.

"Our results highlight the importance of occupational studies in identifying and quantifying environmental risk factors and illustrates the value of taking detailed occupational histories of cancer patients. Mounting evidence suggests that we need to re-evaluate occupational exposure limits in regulatory protection," said Brophy.

Breast cancer is the most frequent cancer diagnosis among women in industrialized countries, and North American rates are among the highest in the world.

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