These disclosures prompted a National Conference to Eliminate Silicosis in 1997, which attracted more than 600 federal employees, industry representatives, union officials, and public health workers. New evidence has emerged suggesting that silica exposure may cause lung cancer in addition to silicosis. In May 1998, the official publication of the American Society of Safety Engineers dubbed crystalline silica “the new asbestos.” Once again, the dangers of silica exposure have been rediscovered. Nearly seven decades after Hawk’s Nest, silicosis has become a “new” disease all over again.
In response, industry has mobilized again. “Silica Scare Beginning to Hit Home,” complained the Aggman, a trade publication of the aggregates industry, which produces crushed stone, sand, and gravel. Writing in the same publication, Mark Savit, the industry’s lobbyist at the well-connected Washington law firm of Patton Boggs, accused “regulatory agencies, such as OSHA, the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)” of going to “great lengths to whip up emotions regarding this issue,” which “could have a profound effect on the way in which our industry does business in the future.” He added, however, that industry would have “multiple opportunities to challenge the regulations that the agencies are trying to impose, and to expose the flawed science upon which they are based. . . . As a first step, my law firm, Patton Boggs, will sponsor ‘Silica in the Next Century—The Need for Sound Public Policy, Research and Liability Prevention’ on March 24, 1997, the day before the OSHA/MSHA meeting. Top scientists, industry and association executives, and attorneys will provide participants with the ammunition they need to defend themselves from the coming attack.”19
As a second step, the “dusty trades” created yet another group, this time called the Silica Coalition. “While the organization is ostensibly aimed at providing ‘sound science’ and legal resources to companies potentially affected by any change in government regulation of silica, it is also clear that increased awareness of the dangers of silica and the resulting threat of litigation hang over the heads of industry executives,” note Rosner and Markowitz.20
Different Disease, Same Story
We have chosen to detail the history of silicosis because it serves as an archetype for the way that government, industry, and public health authorities have reacted to countless similar health threats. Each year, more than 800,000 people develop new cases of occupational illness that, combined with on-the-job injuries, kill as many as 80,000. “The medical costs of occupational injuries and illnesses appear to be much larger than those of AIDS,” concluded a 1997 report in the Archives of Internal Medicine. “The total costs appear to be larger than those for Alzheimer’s disease and are of the same magnitude as those of cancer, of all circulatory disease and of all musculoskeletal conditions.”21 In 1991, former New York Times labor correspondent William Serrin noted that some 200,000 U.S. workers had been killed on the job since the passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, and as many as two million more had died from diseases caused by the conditions where they worked. “That’s 300 dead men, women and children a day. In fact, work kills more people each year than die from AIDS, drugs, or drunken driving and all other motor vehicle accidents,” he observed. “Moreover, another 1.4 million people have been permanently disabled in workplace accidents since the act became law. Yet in those twenty years, only fourteen people have been prosecuted by the Justice Department for workplace safety violations, and only one person, a South Dakota construction contractor who was convicted in the deaths of two workers in a trench cave-in, has gone to jail—for forty-five days.”22
In many cases, corporate and public officials have known for decades about life-threatening chemical hazards while failing to protect workers and publicly proclaiming their safety. The solvent benzene, for example, was considered dangerous as early as the 1920s and was linked to leukemia and other cancers in a 1948 toxicological review prepared for the American Petroleum Institute which stated that “the only absolutely safe concentration for benzene is zero.” Yet benzene continues to be widely used and manufactured in refineries and chemical plants and is still present in the workplace today.
As early as 1918, asbestos was considered so hazardous that a medical statistician for Prudential Insurance Company advised against offering coverage to asbestos workers, “on account of the assumed health-injurious conditions of the injury.” The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company reached similar conclusions in 1922, linking asbestos to fibrosis of the lungs. Numerous articles about asbestosis and “industrial cancer” among asbestos workers appear in the 1930s files of the Industrial Hygiene Foundation. All of these industry sources were talking among themselves about the link between asbestos and cancer long before the Journal of the American Medical Association first reported in 1944 that asbestos was among “agents known to cause occupational cancer.” In 1948, the American Petroleum Institute’s Medical Advisory Committee spoke of the need to “aim at the complete elimination” of worker exposures to both asbestos and benzene. For public consumption, however, industry churned out one misleading study after another, such as a massive 1958 study funded by the Quebec Asbestos Mining Association that was widely cited as the largest epidemiological study done on asbestosis, involving some 6,000 asbestos miners. Performed by the Industrial Hygiene Foundation, the report looked impressive unless you happened to pay attention to its method. “Among numerous errors in method was one central, scientifically inexcusable flaw,” notes David Kotelchuck, director of the Center for Occupational and Environmental Health at Hunter College in New York:The investigators, Daniel Braun and T. Truan, virtually ignored the 20-year time lag between exposure to an agent known to cause lung cancer and the first visible signs of disease (the so-called latent period). They studied a relatively young group of workers, two-thirds of whom were between 20 and 44 years of age. Only 30 percent of the workers had been employed for 20 or more years, the estimated latent period for lung cancer. With so many young people in the study, too young to have the disease although they might well be destined to develop it, Braun and Truan of course did not find a statistically significant increase in lung cancer among the miners. As became obvious later, they had drowned out a clear danger in a sea of misleading data.23
By 1960, 63 scientific papers on the subject of asbestosis had been done, 11 of which were sponsored by the asbestos industry, the other 52 coming from hospitals and medical schools. The 11 industry studies were unanimous in denying that asbestos caused lung cancer and minimizing the seriousness of asbestosis—a position diametrically opposite to the conclusions reached in the nonindustry studies. In 1962, the Gulf Oil Company’s advice to workers, in a training manual for insulators, was that “the fibers of asbestos . . . are not injurious to the respiratory organs. Working with this material does not subject one to this hazard to one’s health.”24 As we all know today, this advice was not only a lie but a murderous lie. The history of industry denials was neatly summarized by David Ozonoff from Boston University, who served as a witness in asbestos litigation and described the series of defenses used by the asbestos industry:Asbestos doesn’t hurt your health. OK, it does hurt your health but it doesn’t cause cancer. OK, asbestos can cause cancer but not our kind of asbestos. OK, our kind of asbestos can cause cancer, but not the kind this person got. OK, our kind of abestos can cause cancer, but not at the doses to which this person was exposed. OK, asbestos does cause cancer, and at this dosage, but this person got his disease from something else, like smoking. OK, he was exposed to our asbestos and it did cause his cancer, but we did not know about the danger when we exposed him. OK, we knew about the danger when we exposed him, but the statute of limitations has run out. OK, the statute of limitations hasn’t run out, but if we’re guilty we’ll go out of business and everyone will be worse off. OK, we’ll agree to go out of business, but only if you let us keep part of our company intact, and only if you limit our liability for the harms we have caused.
M
uch the same story can be told with respect to brown lung disease, an affliction of cotton mill workers that was first observed in the early 1900s but, following the standard pattern, was barely studied for half a century after its discovery. In 1945, a report by the U.S. Department of Labor said brown lung disease was not a problem in American cotton mills. The extent of the problem came to light when a Yale researcher began studying the health of prison inmates who were found to suffer a high experience of the disease at cotton mills operated by inmates of the Federal Penitentiary in Atlanta.25 Similar histories of official neglect have been written about worker deaths from exposure to the metal beryllium; exposures to heavy metals such as lead, mercury, or cadmium; lung hazards such as fiberglass and coal dust; or chemicals such as chlordane and dioxin.
Without Propaganda, Pollution Would Be Impossible
As evidence began to mount in the 1970s about the harmful effects of chemicals such as DDT, PCBs, vinyl chloride and benzene, companies—including Mobil Oil, Monsanto, and Union Carbide—launched multiple massive advertising and public relations campaigns, using slogans like Monsanto’s “without chemicals, life itself would be impossible.” Union Carbide’s propaganda efforts alone involved some 200 company managers, coordinated by the company’s communications department as they pumped out speeches, tapes, canned editorials, educational films for public schools, and articles for newspapers and magazines.26
The propaganda effort relied heavily on questionable statistics designed to create the impression that excessive regulation was stifling American creativity and prosperity. Faced with proof that vinyl chloride caused a rare form of liver cancer, chemical manufacturers announced that a proposed federal standard for vinyl chloride exposure would cost two million jobs and $65 billion. “The standard is simply beyond compliance capability of the industry,” declared their trade association. After the screaming was over, the standard was adopted and the industry continued to flourish, without job losses and at 5 percent of the industry’s estimated cost.27
Information on occupational health hazards is rarely collected and even more rarely reported in the news. In the early part of this century, the concept of industrial safety was a novelty in the United States when Alice Hamilton, the country’s first industrial physician, began to investigate what she came to call “the dangerous trades.” In her autobiography, Hamilton described how she became aware of the problem: “It was also my experience at Hull House that aroused my interest in industrial diseases. Living in a working-class quarter, coming in contact with laborers and their wives, I could not fail to hear talk of the dangers that working men face, of cases of carbon-monoxide gassing in the great steel mills, of painters disabled by lead palsy, of pneumonia and rheumatism among the men in the stockyards.” Hamilton went to the library “to read everything I could find on the dangers to industrial workers, and what could be done to protect them. But it was all German, or British, Austrian, Dutch, Swiss, even Italian or Spanish—everything but American. In those countries, industrial medicine was a recognized branch of the medical sciences, in my own country it did not exist.”28
Decades later, Rachel Scott found the situation had not changed much when she set out to research her 1974 book, Muscle and Blood, which examined conditions affecting workers in steel foundries and other industrial settings. “At the library I had hoped to find some explanation of hazards to foundry workers—mortality studies, perhaps, which would shed some light on whether foundry employees showed higher incidences of diseases commonly associated with dusts and fumes, such as heart disease, respiratory disease, or lung cancer. I found French studies, Italian studies, German studies, and a few British studies, but in the American literature, nothing. . . . In spite of my failure at the library, I could not believe there were no studies of present-day American foundries. But calls to federal and state officials confirmed that, indeed, no one knew how foundry workers may be reacting to their often hazardous environment.”29
Even today, the situation is not much better. “We have better data on cattle slaughter in the United States than we do on work-related deaths and injuries,” says Joseph Kinney of the National Safe Workplace Institute in Chicago, which he founded in 1987 after his brother died in a workplace accident for which the employer was fined only $800.30
Industry-financed propaganda campaigns like the Air Hygiene Foundation have helped create this vacuum of information, along with the notion that other people’s problems are not our own and that the benefits of modern society outweigh the dangers. There is a cost, however, attached to this disregard for what happens to workers in their places of employment. Like coal-mine canaries, workers are often the first to encounter and recognize hazards in the broader environment that affects us all. Exposures to harmful chemicals are typically more severe and frequent in the workplace than elsewhere, and workers who fall sick often serve as early warnings that the solvent, metal, or pesticide with which they are working may be a threat to the broader community. Often, in fact, it has been workers themselves—not doctors, scientists, scholars, or government officials—who have discovered and raised the first alarm about a new health risk.
Lead and the “House of the Butterflies”
Given the long history of worker poisonings from exposure to lead, simple common sense should have been enough to avert the massive lead contamination that the United States and other industrial nations experienced during the twentieth century. After all, lead has been a known poison since antiquity. During the first century A.D., lead miners strapped animal bladders over their mouths as a way to avoid inhaling it. Benjamin Franklin wrote about the “mischievous effect from lead,” which he experienced firsthand in his work as a printer. “You will observe with concern,” he wrote, “how long a useful truth may be known, and exist, before it is generally received and practis’d on.” If he had lived on into modern times, Franklin would no doubt be amazed at the “scientific” arguments that corporate propagandists have mustered to prevent the “useful truth” of lead’s dangers from being “received and practis’d on.”
“Why had it taken so long to confirm that environmental lead was a legitimate hazard?” asks William Graebner, a professor of history at the State University of New York at Fredonia. “The single most important answer to that question is that the lead industries did not want to see the triumph of an environmental perspective; and the lead industries exercised enormous influence over the production and dissemination of knowledge about lead in the four decades after 1925. This influence might best be described as a kind of hegemony over scientific research and over perceptions of lead-related problems.”31
Lead exposure can cause anemia, kidney cancer, brain damage, abdominal pain, weight loss, weakness, reproductive system impairment, and miscarriage. Its effect on the brain can be severe and permanent, causing hallucinations, tremors, outright insanity, and even death. These effects were detailed in 1861 by novelist Charles Dickens, who exposed the horrors visited upon women who went mad working in lead factories. By the late nineteenth century, England was regulating workplace exposure to lead, and by the 1920s Australia and a number of European countries were regulating lead in paint, which was affecting painters and was becoming a common cause of poisoning among children. In the United States, however, the regulatory mechanisms moved in the opposite direction, thanks largely to America’s infatuation with the automobile and the discovery of “no-knock gasoline.”
In 1922, researchers for General Motors discovered that adding tetraethyl lead to gasoline could raise the compression and power of internal combustion engines. By the end of the decade, this discovery helped GM displace Ford as the country’s number-one automaker. The downside, however, was instantly recognized by industrial hygienists. Lead in paint is bad enough, but dried paint at least fixes most of the lead in a solid form that requires some effort to ingest. Tetraethyl lead, however, is an oily liquid that is easily absorbed through the skin or inhaled as it evaporates. This makes it more “bioavailable” than
lead in solid form, as a series of tragedies quickly demonstrated. The first to reach the attention of the public occurred at a tetraethyl lead processing plant owned by Standard Oil in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Within a five-day period beginning on October 24, 1924, five of the plant’s 49 workers died and 35 developed severe dementia and other neurological symptoms of lead poisoning. Several would spend the rest of their lives confined to insane asylums.
Following the all-too-familiar protocol in such cases, the company’s spokesmen responded to these poisonings by attempting to blame the workers for their own fate. The New York Times, which reported on the disaster, noted that a company doctor had suggested that “nothing ought to be said about this matter in the public interest.” The workers’ supervisors opined that “these men probably went insane because they worked too hard.”32 Reports soon emerged, however, of other cases in which workers had died while handling tetraethyl lead. A General Motors research site in Dayton, Ohio, saw worker deaths, as did a DuPont chemical plant at Deepwater, New Jersey. During a two-year time span, the Deepwater plant saw more than 300 cases of lead poisoning. Eighty percent of the workers at DuPont who handled tetraethyl lead during that period were poisoned, some repeatedly. Other employees took to calling the tetraethyl lead unit the “house of the butterflies,” a grim joke about the nonexistent insects that the exposed workers were seeing as part of their hallucinatory dementia.33
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