Sick and Suspicious
The New York Times
September 4, 2003
OP-ED COLUMNIST
By BOB HERBERT
SAN JOSE, Calif. - While I.B.M. officials deny it, evidence is being
offered by stricken employees that unusually large numbers of men
and women who worked for the giant computer corporation over the past
few decades have been dying prematurely.
I.B.M. employees, and relatives of employees who have died,
are claiming in a series of very bitter lawsuits that I.B.M. workers have
contracted cancer and other serious illnesses from chemicals they were
exposed to in semiconductor and disk-drive manufacturing,
laboratory work and other very basic industrial operations.
Dr. Richard Clapp, a respected epidemiologist from Boston University
who was hired by a group of 40 plaintiffs in San Jose, said statistical
analyses he has run from data provided by the company have shown
troubling elevations of breast cancer, non-Hodgkins lymphoma and
brain cancer among I.B.M. employees. He also said the cancers appeared
to be occurring in I.B.M. employees at ages younger than the U.S.
average.
Some of the stories are chilling. Gary Adams, a chemist,
sadly offers the names of friends and co-workers from the mid-1960's to late 1970's
who were part of a small product development group in Building 13 at
the I.B.M. complex on San Jose's South Side: John Wong, Ray
Hawkins, Gordon Mol, Dewayne Johnson, Al Smith, Dan Fields, Robert Cappell, Ken Hart.
All of them died after contracting malignant illnesses, most of them
succumbing in their 30's and 40's. Incredibly, four of them died after
developing brain cancer, a rare disease in adults.
"There are not many still around," said Mr. Adams, who had a
nonmalignant bone tumor removed from his left leg in 1985 and now suffers
from a precancerous condition in his esophagus. "If we'd known
all this from the beginning," he said, "we'd never have gone to work for
I.B.M. We'd all have become shoe salesmen or something."
More than 200 plaintiffs in California, New York and Minnesota
have sued I.B.M., which has spent many decades cultivating a reputation as
a corporation that emphasized workplace safety and went out of its
way to protect its employees. The lawsuits insist that the reality was
otherwise, that officials at I.B.M. knew that workers were being put
at risk of contracting cancer and other serious illnesses by their regular
exposure to a variety of poisonous chemicals, many known to be carcinogens.
Companies that provided chemicals to I.B.M. are also defendants in the suits.
The workers were not told of the risks, according to the
lawsuits, even after they began showing symptoms of systemic chemical poisoning.
Alida Hernandez, a retired I.B.M. employee, held a number of jobs that
required her to work with toxic chemicals. She learned she had
breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy in 1993. She told me this
week, "If they had told me when I first interviewed that I would be
working with hazardous chemicals that might cause cancer,
I would not have gone to work."
I.B.M. has vehemently denied all of the plaintiffs' claims, and is being
represented by Jones Day, one of the firms that represented R. J.
Reynolds in the tobacco industry's fight against a long line of lawsuits.
I.B.M. officials have said all along - and repeated to me this week - that
they do not believe there is any scientific basis for any of the
plaintiffs' claims. There is no evidence, they said, that any employee
contracted cancer as a result of exposure to chemicals at I.B.M. In a
work force as large as I.B.M.'s, they said, many workers will die from
many different illnesses, including cancer.
I.B.M. officials also said they will present their own experts
who will refute Dr. Clapp's findings.
Four of the 40 lawsuits in San Jose are due to go to trial next month.
All the suits are being watched extremely closely by the semiconductor
industry, which had been warned for years that chip-making and
other processes requiring the use of tremendous amounts of toxic
chemicals might be associated with cancers, miscarriages, birth defects
and other very serious health problems.
The processes at most U.S. plants, including I.B.M.'s, have improved.
They are much cleaner and are believed to be much safer now. But an
extraordinary number of workers were employed in the older facilities
as the computer industry grew with breathtaking speed to become one
of the dominant forces in American life in the last half of the 20th century.
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
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